I Love a Mystery

UPDATE:

Fort Worth Star-Telegram withdraws the details regarding the allegation that Joe Lockhart requested copies of the memos from Bill Burkett. This blows up most of INDC's analysis.

(sigh) When am I ever going to learn to follow the 48 hour rule?


UPDATE:

Bill at INDC Journal has an updated timeline.

Bill noted:

UPDATE: Let me explain my read on why Burkett said something that contradicts Lockhart:

First of all, he's clearly incompetent (look at the forgeries) and probably unstable, and he probably never saw or perhaps absorbed Lockhart's quote. In his clumsy read of the situation, he thinks that he's protecting Lockhart by implying that he wouldn't give them the documents. This does two things:

1. Enhances Burkett's sense of self-importance in the narrative; the Kerry campaign wanted his help.


2. In Burkett's mind, it insulates the Dems from the charge of forgery.

If the Dems couldn't get their hands on the documents, then they have no responsibility for awareness that they were forgeries; but what Burkett may not realize is the fact that Cleland and Lockhart already went on the record with a denial about any knowledge of or conversation about the documents.

We all knew that the denial of any conversation about the documents was bullshit, of course, but now we have one of the parties, no matter how incredible, on record to back up part of the suspicion.

Bill quotes commenter "Prakk" on a thread at The Politburo Diktat:

This is ENDGAME. True or false Burkett just moved the piece on the board that forces the issue.

Well, I don't know about this being the ENDGAME. I do agree that this just reopened a can of worms that the Dems were on the verge of recanning.

I'm looking forward to seeing just how far this goes


-- Original Post --

Ra^therBogusGate has some interesting legs. The fact that the forged National Guard memos were produced using Microsoft Word simply isn’t in doubt so any late breaking tidbits of information pertaining to proportional spacing and so on just isn’t that interesting to me any more.

On the other hand, the action of various players _CBS (particularly Mary Mapes and the big boy himself, Dan), the Kerry campaign and the carpet chewing Bill Burkett, led myself and others to suspect some degree of collusion.

Now Clarice Feldman of the American Thinker has posted an intriguing timeline that taught me a number of new things about this story.

It’s interesting reading. Feldman observes the uncanny manner in which a number of organizations—all of which deny communicating with each other—managed to fly in close formation. Coincidently, members of said formation also happened to carry out certain actions within a tight period of time. Careful observers will, of course, be amazed to learn that every single action couldn’t have been better timed to inflict maximum damage to President Bush’s reelection campaign if they had been deliberately been organized to do so.

And the sum of every one of these carefully uncoordinated actions might have changed the course of the 2004 election if, of course, if the “memos” that all of these actions totally depended on weren’t revealed to be foraged. (Ooops!)

So now, boys and girls, it seems that we might have a real-life mystery on our hands. Cursory examination of Feldman’s timeline suggests that a number of players in both the MSM and the Kerry campaign were in collusion in an effort to torpedo Bush’s reelection.

One question that, I think, is fairly easily answered is Why now? Why not launch this 72 hours before Election Day, just the way Bush’s DUI was outted in 2000 election?

That now doesn’t seem like a half-bad idea, particularly after seeing how quickly this entire thing became unraveled. Anyway, Anne Coulter pointed out that the MSM didn’t wait until three days before the election because they COULDN’T wait that long. If the MSM waited that long then—at the rate that John Kerry’s campaign is self-destructing—there wouldn’t be any Kerry’s campaign left to save. Here’s Coulter:

CBS was attempting to manipulate a presidential election in wartime. What if CBS had used better forgeries? What if – like Bush's 30-year-old DUI charge – the media had waited 72 hours before the election to air this character assassination?
There is one reason CBS couldn't wait until just before the election to put these forgeries on the air: It would be too late. Kerry was crashing and burning – because of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (Funny that the Swift Boat veterans haven't been able to get on Kerry PR agency CBS News.)

I think I’ll let Ann have the last word.