Ace,

"I realize the Kerry-Edwards team favors taking as many positions as possible. But can they really simultaneously claim that the documents are forgeries and that President Bush is obliged to respond to the allegations contained in these admitted forgeries?"

How badly off-message is the Kerry-Edwards campaign that the DNC Committee Chairman is suggesting that the President's White House advisor is behind the stories and at the same time Harkin, Brazille, Edwards, et al are demanding the President respond to the allegations?

Dude, send this to Kerry Spot. It's a beaute.

This is so beautiful, I think I'm going to cry.

MeToo,

Okay, I did. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm doing an inordinate amoung of link-whoring today.

Ace-- your own reporting below, linked from the Spectator, says that the documents came to CBS from a DNC oppo researcher.

If that's proven to be true, Terry is lying, or there's a rogue element in the DNC (like Michael Knight, but for evil).

Cheers,
Dave
Garfield Ridge

McAuliffe lying?

I will not permit such over-the-top scurrillous speculation in this classy blog.

shit. That was my perfect oportunity to say, "The deuce you say, man!" and I blew it.

I just completely booted it.

Ace-- the jerkstore called, they're running out of you.

Are the Democrats supposed to have "groups associated with us" anyway? Wouldn't McAwful's comment seem to imply there are 527s illegally coordinating with the DNC?

/hopeful

just a bit of tinfoil-hat partisan conspiracy theory here, but...

is anybody yet exploring the idea that these docs may have come from the clinton camp? i know it's a longshot (and probably unprovable, even if it were true), but there's no doubt in my mind that this is a clintons vs. kennedys power struggle behind the scenes, the clinton wing wants hillary in '08, and it wouldn't be the first time something damaging to kerry came out of the clinton camp.

probably crazy stuff, but i guess i just don't put much past the clintons these days. their deviousness is part of what makes them such effective politicians.

Ace,

Don't feel bad, if you count hits from trackbacks, between you and powerline I'm linkwhoring like a mutha!

I question the timing of his rebuttal. He should have rebuked the forgery story months ago.... oh...wait...

It's what you'd call the "fully-automatic scattershot" method.

I would put money on the DNC and here's why...

Assuming for a moment that those documents are forged (I can't be arsed with the whole alleged bit..)

Those documents are so badly forged that they could not withstand any reasonable amount of scrutiny. It took some unexperienced bloggers a couple of hours to spot the issue, it would have taken an expert seconds, minutes at the most.

If those documents had come from Karl Rove, his intent would have been to have them aired. If they are poor fakes, then chances are they will be stopped at the first scrutiny. Therefore, he would have made them stand up to reasonable scrutiny. Unless of course he planned on CBS lapping it up without authentication, which says more about CBS than Karl Rove.

However, if the documents had come from a friendly source (like a DNC superstar), then chances are that they would received far less scrutiny (if any at all given Rathers tendancy to shoot from the hip with facts). In this case, they did receive far less scrutiny than they deserved.

It has already been suggested (I would like some kind of further verification though) that the documents came via the DNC. Of course whether the DNC generated those documents themselves, or obtained them from somewhere else, we probably will never know. Either way, I don't think even Rove can get away with calling up McAuliffe one night and offering him some juicy shit on Bush without it raising some kind of suspicion.
If it passed through the Dems hands from a trusted source, again, it takes a couple of hours to get it checked out unless of course you don't care whether its true if you want it to be true.

Since the lefties are so in favour of questioning timing, why aren't they questioning the timing of the arrival of the Clinton guys in the Kerry camp, and the materialization of a weak Bush attack with a potentially massive Kerry backlash, especially if you believe in the notion that the Dems are throwing the election for Hillary in '08.

PS The double talk from the left on this issue is both amazing and depraved.

Anti-Bushism really IS becoming the new anti-Semitism.

Look at how the DNC is talking out of both sides of their face: McAuliffe stating that the documents are a malicious forgery planted by Bush, while Edwards SIMULTANEOUSLY demands that Bush apologize for the revelations these forged documents purport to expose.

Is this not eerily reminiscent of the kind of virulent anti-Semitism on display in the modern Middle East where we hear, for instance that the Jews made up the Holocaust, yet they also DESERVED the Holocaust? Or how many accuse Israel's tactics as being akin to the Nazis... yet these same accusers are open admirers of the Nazis?

The thing about anti-Semitism is that no matter what the Jews do, they're worthy of hatred. Here, we have the perfect instance of that grafted on to President Bush: if the documents are real, he should apologize for the truth about him that they uncover; if the documents are fake, he should apologize for having forged them in order to gin up sympathy with voters.

And doubtless if the documents had never surfaced, we'd hear about how he's hiding something.

Can't you just imagine Karl Rove saying to Dubya:

"You know, George, were ahead in the polls, we've tightend our base, and we're surging ahead on this "vision thing"....I GOT AN IDEA! Now, it sounds crazy....but it just might work.....here's what we do...."

You always know you have an asshole by the balls when he starts to scream louder.

This is the very reason Rather couldn't give the story up.

It is part of the Kedwards campaign. Without it they have no talking points. This was supposed to blunt the swiftie attack.

Ooooooooooppsssssssssss.