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September 20, 2004

It Gets Worse: Burkett Gave Documents to CBS Only Upon the Condition that CBS Broker a Meeting with the Kerry Campaign

As I said: The epitaph of this story will be, Everything was much worse than it seemed, even if you thought it was all pretty shoddy to begin with.

WASHINGTON — CBS arranged for a confidential source to talk with Joe Lockhart, a top aide to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, after the source provided the network with the now-disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. John Kerry aide Joe Lockhart, shown here in 1998, chatted with a former Texas National Guard officer, whose number CBS provided.
Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a female producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart.

Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would help arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.

The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS' handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election. This "poses a real danger to the potential credibility of a news organization," said Aly Colón, a news ethicist at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

Ahem. Give Ms. Colon credit for dry understatement.

...
CBS would not discuss the propriety of the network serving as a conduit between its partisan source, Burkett, and the Kerry campaign. “It was not part of any deal” with Burkett to obtain the documents, West said, declining to elaborate.

But Burkett said Monday that his contact with Lockhart was indeed part of an "understanding" with CBS. Burkett said his interest in contacting the campaign was to offer advice in responding to Republican criticisms about Kerry's Vietnam service. It had nothing to do with the documents, he said.

More at the link.

posted by Ace at 10:04 PM

Comments

Do you buy this Ace? I don't. The Dems have known about this a long time.

Posted by: Mark on September 20, 2004 10:13 PM

Oh.My.God.
Oh.My.God.

What were they thinking?
No, no, wrong question....

WERE they thinking????

Jesus!!!

Posted by: Sofia on September 20, 2004 10:14 PM

what works better for you Dan? Would like some Kool-aid or can you fit your mouth around the tailpipe of the satellite truck?

Posted by: OneDrummer on September 20, 2004 10:30 PM

Well, let's give CBS credit for one thing. they've helped us do the one thing we've been trying to do for years -- disprove the myth of media impartiality.

Posted by: Brian B on September 20, 2004 10:41 PM

so, let's have a history lesson. Nixon was hung, and rightly so, for covering up a felony.

Now, we have a major media outlet, defaming and slandering a sitting politician, creating and fabricating documents (probably with the help and/or coordination of the opposition party) in the hopes of altering the election. Hmm...

I smell blood.......... and I'm mad as hell!

Posted by: OneDrummer on September 20, 2004 10:45 PM

I hate to be the bearer of conspiracy theories, but why the hell are all these Democrats (and former Clinton pals) admitting to anything? Am I the only one who finds this all beyond suspicious? And all while (*cough*bullshit*cough*) Clinton and his wife are convieniently holed up because of heart bypass surgery?

The chances of ALL this happening right after the RNC are just slightly LESS probable than having your car squashed by a meteorite while driving to work on a day you were supposed to be on vacation. Call me Tinfoil, but it's all just getting to be too much for me... It's TOO terrible, at just the wrong time. Nobody is this bad a candidate with this bad of luck.

Posted by: The Black Republican on September 20, 2004 10:54 PM

Not buying it...even a little bit...

Lockhart and Burkett have coordinated their stories on this...Mapes is toast, so they're trying to lay everything on her to cover their asses. Even if she comes out later and says it's not true, the Democrats can point to her lying about the story in the first place and say: you can't trust her, she's a liar!

They are hanging out to dry in every sense of the phrase...

See my post Another Kerry Rathergate Connection for my take on the "Lockhart-Burkett" conversation...

This is just more of the same...

Posted by: Jim B on September 20, 2004 10:59 PM

BR, you could be correct about the Clintons. That would explain why the fakes were such low-quality -- they wanted this thing to blowup.

Posted by: Mark on September 20, 2004 11:40 PM

CBS needs to take a deep breath. Everything's going to be all right. They just need to: Reorganize as a 527. Procure funding from Soros. Continue apace in their Kerry promotional efforts.

No worries (except for that little matter of giving up the FCC license to operate in the public interest at their O&O stations).

Posted by: Melissa on September 20, 2004 11:56 PM

Coelho on MSNBC says this story will die in a week. No way. I think it stays hot, not because of its relevance (sure, it's significant) but because it's a welcome diversion from that OTHER story nobody really wants to think about. Not to blame anyone - we don't live in the media-delay bubble our grandparents enjoyed during WWII, when Western Union brought you the only really bad news about the war. We're flooded with negative news, 24-7. It's no wonder people want to follow this relatively harmless, though important, story. I think that gives it a longer life.

Posted by: RKA on September 20, 2004 11:56 PM

John Kerry is on david letterman right now

Posted by: toni on September 21, 2004 12:00 AM

TBR,

I've been thinking the same thing for a while now. How could the Kerry candidacy be this bad? I'm really not one for conspiracy theories but, c'mon, someone seems to be helping Kerry sabotage his whole raison d'etre, i.e., his presidential entitlement. Hmmm. Who else might have the same entitlement fetish?

Posted by: kelly on September 21, 2004 12:18 AM

CBS to the public: We hold the confidentiality of all our sources sacred.

CBS to the DNC: "Hello, we have this source that wants to give us documents that will help destroy Bush, but he wants to talk with you first to coordinate strategy."

The public: What the Fuck!!!

The Republicans: What the Fuck!@!

CBS's reporter/producer personally calls Clinton's old secretary Joe Lockhart, on Burketts "insistance", to have Burkett confirm the "counterattack" he discussed with Cleland Aug 21st is now underway. No doubt then Lockhart talks to liberal Mary Mapes to verify that 60 Minutes II will run the day before the Dems launch "Fortunate Son", the Texans for the Truth ad, the Moveon ads, use surrogate Tom Harkin to give a Bush was a bad Guardsman speech, and the Guard allusions are inserted into Kerry and Edwards speeches.

Collusion.

It sure would be interesting to track down what came out of Cleland's mouth on his "Band of Brothers Carnival Tour" right after 60 Minutes II came out with the "smoking documents" story.

I have no doubt the MSM will be hitting this all, very hard. There's blood in the water, a huge story that could make a career...and the other sharks only want to get a bite of someone.

Posted by: cedarford on September 21, 2004 12:51 AM

How much worse can it get? This has gone beyond one election and one story. It's now apparent that these people will do *anything* no matter how despicable.

I'm happy that Dan Rather stepped in it so very, very badly. But it kills me to think that these people are much worse than even I thought.

Posted by: Blacknimbus on September 21, 2004 01:19 AM

Memogate enters the finger pointing stage.

Rather points finger at Burkett, getting him to admit misleading on the air. Burkett doesn't want to be the fall guy, points finger at DNC/KE04. Lockhart points finger at Mapes. Etc. The tag-team wrestling match will continue.

As this circus continues, the occasional fact will stick to the occasional actor. Talented investigative reporters will start putting things together. Players will rat each other out. The stink will rise. You will see it get a lot closer to Kerry than he wants.

BTW, the meme of the day is "Bush's failed war in Iraq" in response to any question that intimates some connection between KE04 and memogate.

LMAO

Posted by: Thales on September 21, 2004 01:24 AM

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Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
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A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
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In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
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I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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