I was really hoping to concentrate on 9/11 memoria on this very important anniversary, but this CBS memo thing is moving so fast, and it keeps getting juicier.

I almost feel sorry for our [link|http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn12.html|real life Ted Baxter]. Then I remember what a pompous fraud he is, and my sympathy evaporates like the morning dew.

Excerpts:

Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.

Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away...
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "

Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''

Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

I say:

Here's one for you conspiracy buffs. We still don't know where that fake memo came from. Could it be a plant by Karl Rove? Sort of a sting operation for the bias of certain mainstream news organizations. Give them an obvious forgery that they can't resist, let them swallow the bait whole, then expose the fraud. And finally, upbraid the suckers for not having done any proper fact checking.

The only catch in the theory is that every step along the way beyond the first one involves people doing what they would be doing anyway, even if there were no conspiracy. Maybe it's more like a prospiracy, or emergent behavior or something. But that was one clumsy forgery. If it were intended to hurt Bush, wouldn't they have done a better job of it? Maybe not. Remember, this is the bunch that lets Terry McAuliffe run their party.

Anyway, Ted Baxter... I mean Dan Baxter... I mean Ted Rather... has been made a fool of again.

I suppose Dan Rather can be considered a politician of sorts.