Ace,

A note of thanks.

I'm stuck at work in the salt mines, and appreciate the updates (I am also sick with a stomach virus I got from bad Indian food).

Anyway, this whole thing strikes me as odd.

When, if ever, has anyone at the MSM level of Dan Rather, gone public with memos that are not signed and with no letterhead, from a guy who's been dead for 20 years, and no reported sourcing as to who authenticated the documents and why the source felt them to be genuine.

This is not to say that anonymous sources for documents can't be trusted.

But aside from where the documents came, it seems on its face that the provenance of the documents themselves was totally crap from the get-go.

And Dan Rather didn't know this?

You may be right, this may cost Rather his job.

Ace--

This is like my birthday, Christmas, Hanukah, the Super Bowl, Burning Man, the season premiere of "The Sopranos," Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla, Patton's Third Army racing through Nazi lines, and my very first nocturnal emission, all rolled into one. Oh, and the first time I saw B.J. and the Bear. And it's STILL better than that.

I mean, I'm so excited. I'M SO PUMPED RIGHT NOW.

Thank you.

Dave
Garfield Ridge

Great addition: Col. Kilian's son Gary also thinks the memo is a fraud.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040909_1710.html

This whole episode reminds me of the Simpsons where Bart blatantly turns his Ds to As, and Homer, when presented with the report card, say, "You don't think much of me, do ya, boy?"

These forgers have probably gotten so used to having their shoddy products accepted by the DU and MoveOn™ types that they expect the same uncritical acceptance from everyone else.

Hey, this wouldn't be the first time a darling of the left was brought down by a typewriter. Witness (no pun intended) Alger Hiss' perjury conviction, and the old Underwood he used to type copies of State Department documents for sending to the Soviets.

This is so, so weird. I leave for work, slave away for a few hours, come home, pour out an unhealthy soft drink, and suddenly I'm thisclose to believing that a Freeper-initiated conspiracy-checkout is *on to something.*

That being said; is there any possibility that this is a hoax? I just can't believe somebody would be stupid enough to think that a computer-produced document wouldn't be catchable. I mean, there's a simple enough way around it - TYPE THE THING UP ON A REAL, OLD TYPEWRITER! It's foolproof! (And I was born on '79 - I have never used an old typewriter for anything, really, though I know where to find one - so I don't think this can be blamed on a prospective forger's youth. He'd still be an idiot :)).