BeldarBlog

Help CBS News' Rathergate rogues line up for the scaffold

While driving the other night, I was listening to the fourth movement of Hector Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique — an old favorite that I'd performed (in a transcription for military band) with the Longhorn Concert Band while I was in college.  This symphony is perhaps the most famous example of romantic "program music": 

Under the influence of opium (in the 1855 version), a young and sensitive artist (Berlioz himself), experiences a series of visions — the different movements of the symphony — in which his beloved figures as a theme, the idée fixe, which recurs in every movement, though each time in a different form.

The fourth movement, called "Marche au supplice," contains a rousing, self-confident, and indeed arrogant march — quintessentially French, and featuring the wonderfully ominous, repeated thirteen-stroke drumrolls of a public execution.  It was written to portray "the artist, led to execution for murdering his beloved," strutting defiantly along despite his impending and well-deserved doom.  Only after mounting the scaffold does he remember his beloved, however — represented by a short, sad solo clarinet passage sounding his beloved's theme — and then "the melody is abruptly cut off by the fall of the guillotine and the concluding uproar." 

Now why did this wonderfully evocative music make me suddenly think of — Dan Rather?

Today's Los Angeles Times includes an article by staff writer Elizabeth Jensen headlined "From a Who Did It to a Who'll Get It," with this subhead: "With careers in jeopardy, 'the knives have come out' at CBS News. Rather's job seems safe, but he's fighting to keep it." 

I suspect that my blogospheric friend Professor Stephen Bainbridge must have spat out a mouthful of excellent wine when he read these paragraphs:

And for conspiracy theorists who have speculated — with no proof — that Republican tricksters are behind the possibly fake documents, Thornburgh has a connection to Karl Rove, a longtime Bush strategist.

Rove, who denied this week to the Washington Times that he had anything to do with the documents falling into CBS' hands, worked on Thornburgh's unsuccessful campaign for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 1991.

Well, yes, Rove and Thornburgh do indeed have a "connection" — one that ended up with Rove successfully suing the former Attorney General and winning a judgment for an unpaid $170,000 consulting fee (presumably plus costs, interest, and attorneys' fees).  As Professor Bainbridge has pointed out,

By all accounts, Thornburgh is an upright guy, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't change the fact, however, that he has a perceived conflict of interest that will forever call into question his impartiality. CBS would have been better served to find somebody with no such [anti-Rove] taint.

(Personally, I'm satisfied with Thornburgh's appointment, and applaud CBS News for picking someone with the stature of a former Attorney General as the legal representative for the inquiry.  Let's just be glad that they didn't pick Ramsey Clark.)

The LAT article provides yet more information about who inside CBS News was involved in the Ra^thergate fiasco, and in what degree:

Whether or not Thornburgh is predisposed to blame Rather or CBS for the report, many inside the network nonetheless are questioning why Heyward was allowed to choose the panel along with CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves. [CBS News president Andrew] Heyward, they argued, could just as well end up taking the blame for oversight procedures that might have gone wrong in the reporting of the story.

How deeply Heyward got involved was unclear.

Rather, in an interview Monday with the Los Angeles Times, said it was difficult to pinpoint blame for the lapses, "given the number of people involved in this, directly involved in the news-gathering, vetting and approving."

"There were a lot of people, including myself," Rather said.

The New York Times reported that Rather had said he had specifically asked Heyward to have hands-on involvement in the story from the beginning.

Other executives have said Heyward wasn't present at any of the meetings where the decisions were made about whether to use the documents, with Betsy West, the division's senior vice president, overseeing the process instead. Genelius said that Heyward would have no comment.

"Dan and Andrew speak several times a day every day," Genelius said. "It is not contentious, and both of them are looking forward to having the panel report its findings. There will be full cooperation."

Friends and neighbors, the Ra^thergate scandal surpasses any previous shoddy episode in the history of American journalism.  NBC's "Dateline" making a GM pickup truck explode as a special-effects presentation wasn't remotely as wicked and corrupt, yet as NRO's Byron York reminds us, that scandal resulted in the forced departure of everyone from NBC News president Michael Gartner on down through the story's  executive producer, senior producer, segment producer, and on-air reporter.

The LAT article concludes by noting that

Rather's future may end up determined less by the outcome of the report than by the reaction of CBS' affiliates around the country, some of which have been urging CBS to make a change for some time in order to boost its third-place ratings.

A number of affiliates this week reported being inundated with calls and e-mails advocating getting rid of Rather, many of them the result of an organized campaign.

Oh yes, let's continue to nudge the affiliates.  You can write a free, uniquely personalized email to all of the roughly 200 CBS affiliates via this handy link at Rathergate.com.  Yes, the campaign is organized, but the specific message will be yours.

Strike up the Berlioz, I say!  Mr. Rather, that short, plaintive clarinet solo was your one-time beloved, the Muse of Journalistic Truth — and you and your cohort murdered her.  On to the scaffold with you all, I demand!  And let the guillotine do its bloody, very necessary work!

Republican congressional candidate compares opponent to Dan Rather

I don't know much about Texas Republican congressional candidate Louie Gohmert, but I'm hugely amused at his latest TV ad in his campaign against Democratic incumbent Max Sandlin:  "Seen  Max Sandlin's negative ads?  They've got more holes than a CBS News story by Dan Rather ...."   Per ABC News,

CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said Friday the network would not comment on the ad....

Jim Dow, a spokesman for Sandlin, said the ad is "a juvenile and invalid comparison that folks don't really care about anyway. Voters in East Texas care about jobs, health care and integrity, not Dan Rather."

That's not exactly a ringing defense of Dan Rather from Congressman Sandlin, is it?  His spokesman did have the chutzpah to use the words "integrity" and "Dan Rather" in the same sentence, but as an example of contrasting concepts.  (Hat-tip Rathergate.)

Oh, what lawyer shall sue CBS on Burkett's behalf?

Tucked away on page A8 of today's WaPo is an article by Michael Dobbs entitled "Source for Rather Seeks New Lawyer, Might Sue CBS." 

Mr. Dobbs reports that CBS News' Ra^thergate source Bill Burkett is no longer being represented by attorney David Van Os, who "bowed out because he was involved in the initial negotiations with CBS and feels a conflict of interest."  Leaving aside any arguable appearance of impropriety from Mr. Van Os' heavy involvement in Texas Democratic Party politics and current candidacy for the Texas Supreme Court, Mr. Van Os certainly made the right decision if only based on the likelihood that he would be a material fact witness in any defamation case brought by Mr. Burkett (albeit one whose testimony might in significant part be shielded by his continuing attorney-client privilege obligations to his former client).

As for Mr. Burkett's current counsel,

[Gabe] Quintanilla said he is suffering from severe back problems and cannot handle the deluge of calls and messages in an incident that, he said, has generated more conspiracy theories than the "grassy knoll" did in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A third lawyer, Lin Wood of Atlanta, who represented former Olympic Games security guard Richard Jewell in a successful defamation suit against several news organizations, said yesterday that he had declined a request from Quintanilla to take the Burkett case. Wood pleaded "time constraints" as well as his "high regard for CBS News."

"It appears highly questionable that he has a legitimate defamation claim" against CBS, said Wood, noting that his opinion was based on news reports about the case rather than privileged information. 

Texas, of course, is home to hundreds and hundreds of lawyers, including some of the most high-profile contingent-fee lawyers in the country, and it seems likely that Mr. Burkett may seek counsel who'd undertake his representation on that basis.  Although their terms are variable and subject to negotiation, such fee arrangements oftentimes include provisions under which the lawyer not only invests his time, but also the out-of-pocket expenses of litigation, with the hope of being repaid for either only out of whatever money is eventually recovered by way of judgment or settlement.  In contemplating the possibility of undertaking Mr. Burkett's representation, a prudent lawyer would assume that the case will require heavy investments of both time and money. 

Moreover, regardless of the results of CBS News' pending self-investigation, CBS News can be expected to defend itself tenaciously against any claim that it has harmed Mr. Burkett or his reputation.  That CBS News' performance in this debacle may have made it a journalistic disgrace and a national laughingstock does not make it an easy mark for a defamation case from one in Mr. Burkett's position.

And Mr. Burkett, intentionally or not, has made himself into a "public figure" at least since his allegations last spring about the purported systematic destruction of President Bush's military records from the Texas Air National Guard — meaning that to prevail against CBS News, he and his counsel would have to overcome the formidable "actual malice" hurdle imposed by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. 

I think that a very strong case could be made by another potential defamation plaintiff — George W. Bush — that with respect to him, CBS News acted with both subjective malice and objectively reckless disregard for the falsity of its statements about him in particular.  For a variety of reasons, however, the principal target of CBS News' broadcasts is the least likely person to sue.  (Expert witnesses Linda James and Emily Will, retired Col. Buck Staudt, or other supporting members of the dramatis personae in CBS News' tragic comedy of errors are differently situated, and might have more attractive claims than Mr. Burkett.)

But from what's in the public domain now, I see little basis for supposing that a plausible case of "actual malice" could be made for CBS News' statements about Mr. Burkett.  Nor is it immediately obvious what, if anything, that CBS News has said about Mr. Burkett is false, and his reputation was hardly unsullied even before this fall's scandal regarding the forged Killian documents.  And Mr. Burkett's other possible claims besides those sounding in defamation law (and its offshoots, like "false light depiction") — invasion of privacy? breach of contract? — look no more promising to me than his potential defamation claims.

Mr. Burkett does have, of course, the alternative of retaining counsel on a regular hourly-rate plus expenses basis.  But those costs are likely to run into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in fairly short order in a case like this one.  Moreover, any legal team representing Mr. Burkett would be wise to include among its members someone with substantial expertise in criminal law — and such lawyers don't typically work on a contingent fee basis.

Representing Mr. Burkett would certainly confer collateral publicity on whatever lawyer undertook to represent him.  One must wonder, however, whether that publicity would be positive or negative.  And the bridges between Mr. Burkett and his former political soulmates on the Democratic side of the aisle seem to have been fairly crisply burnt by this point — with the fires having been lit from both sides roughly simultaneously.  The prospects of Mr. Burkett finding counsel to represent him on a pro bono publico basis seem remote.

Perhaps some prominent, clever, and entrepreneurial lawyer will see an angle that I'm missing and step forward as Mr. Burkett's champion.  But it's not hard to see why lawyers aren't swarming his porch with contingent fee contracts in hand at the moment.  Both opponents and supporters of the contingent fee system agree that it is driven, for better and sometimes for worse, by simple market economics as those principles intersect with the lawyer-participants' assessment of potentially valuable claims.  If it turns out that Mr. Burkett can't find counsel, that may reflect nothing more than a consensus among knowledgeable lawyer profit-maximizers that his claim is ultimately not worth filing.

A challenge to those who claim that the SwiftVets' allegations have been "debunked" or are "unsubstantiated"

My lawyer readers will immediately recognize this as an invitation to Kerry supporters to make a motion for partial summary judgment on the SwiftVets' claims.

This short paragraph from a New York Times article perfectly illustrates the liberal media's widespread characterization of the results to date of the SwiftVets' campaign (boldface added):

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which drew national attention with advertisements making unsubstantiated attacks against Mr. Kerry's military service, has less money and uses several strategies to stretch its dollars, said one of its leaders, John O'Neill.

To find a similar example from the blogosphere, one need look no farther than Andrew Sullivan's passing dismissal of the SwiftVets' campaign (boldface added):

As word spread, anti-Kerry forces sent in more money to the Swift Boat Veterans for truth website, allowing them to ramp up their ad efforts. And within a few days, the old media was forced to cover the claims extensively — even if much of their coverage amounted to a debunking.

As someone who's followed the SwiftVets' campaign closely — someone who's read Brinkley's Tour of Duty, O'Neill's Unfit for Command, and Kranish et al.'s John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography cover to cover, plus all of the mainstream media reports I could find on the internet and a goodly portion of what's appeared from both political sides of the blogosphere — I'm simply stunned to read these sorts of statements.

I can think of one major SwiftVets allegation on which they've arguably failed to offer more than circumstantial evidence — that Kerry "gamed the system" to get his medals. Kerry's stonewall — his refusal to sign Standard Form 180 and thereby release the documentation that should, if it exists, reveal still-hidden details like how he came to get his first Purple Heart — has been effective in keeping the SwiftVets from nailing down that point with direct evidence. Yet the circumstantial case is powerful — Kerry's commanding officer at the time, Skip Hibbard, says he refused to approve that Purple Heart in December 1968, yet Kerry showed up with the medal anyway in March 1969 in some as-yet-unexplained fashion.

I can think of other SwiftVets allegations on which there is directly competing evidence that requires the public to draw conclusions. For example, does one credit Adm. Bill Schachte's account of his first-hand knowledge of how Kerry received the trivial wound that led to his first Purple Heart, or does one credit Zaldonis' and Runyan's claims that Schachte wasn't aboard the skimmer? Which of the eyewitnesses does one choose to find credible on the question of whether Kerry was or wasn't under enemy fire when he plucked Rassmann from the Bay Hap River? Other allegations require an exercise of subjective judgment. For example, was Kerry's pursuit and dispatching of a single VC soldier sufficiently valorous to merit his Silver Star?

But on none of these issues I've just listed have the SwiftVets' allegations been "debunked" or proven "unsubstantiated." Andrew Sullivan or the NYT repeating over and over that they have been simply don't make them so. To employ the legal jargon of summary judgment proceedings, a rational factfinder could conclude from the evidence that the SwiftVets have produced on each of these allegations that, indeed, they're true. A trial judge who dismissed these allegations outright, without letting the factfinder (typically a jury) consider them, would certainly be reversed on appeal and told to let the jury do its work. They haven't, in lay terms, been "debunked" — but rather, they're fiercely disputed by competent evidence (some of it eyewitness, some of it circumstantial, some of it documentary).

Hence my challenge for the weekend to my readers — you're probably a minority, as these things go, but I know from my comments pages that you're out there — who may agree with the NYT or Mr. Sullivan:

Can you identify even one specific and material SwiftVets allegation that you believe to have been fully "debunked" or fully proven to be "unsubstantiated"?

Some ground rules for this challenge that I think are not unreasonable:

By "specific," I mean to exclude sweeping conclusions like "John Kerry wasn't as big a hero as he's made out." By material, I mean to exclude trivia like "the VC soldier John Kerry shot was in a uniform instead of in a loincloth." And I ask that if you're to make an honest effort to meet my challenge, you provide quotes and links, both to the SwiftVets' allegations and to the evidence that you offer to show debunking or lack of substantiation.

If you rely on documents — for example, Larry Thurlow's Bronze Star citation as support for the proposition that he and Kerry were under enemy fire after PCF 3 was struck by a mine — then to reach "debunked" status, you ought to show that there are no contrary eyewitness accounts to those documents, nor other contrary documents. Otherwise, you've merely established that a dispute exists — what lawyers would call a "genuine issue of fact" that must be resolved by a judgment call as to which side has the greater weight of the credible evidence.

Saying your side has the greater weight of the evidence isn't "debunking" or showing that something is "unsubstantiated," it's saying that your side ought to ultimately prevail on the factual dispute, and that's a very different kettle of fish. To use a converse example by way of illustration: I would argue that the "Christmas in Cambodia" story repeatedly told by Sen. Kerry has indeed been thoroughly debunked and proved unsubstantiated — that is, there simply is no credible evidence from which any rational factfinder could conclude that Kerry's claim to have spent Christmas 1968 several miles inside Cambodia, under friendly fire and on a secret mission, was truthful.

I of course reserve the right to offer a rebuttal, as will, I'm sure, my like-minded readers. But I'm genuinely curious about this, and will try to summarize the results of this challenge fairly in a new post sometime early next week.

----------------------

Update (Mon Oct 18 @ 10:40am): It's no one's fault in particular unless my own, but the comments to this post have kept coming in. Every time I'd try to take a day to write a summary of the responses to my challenge, in would come four or five new comments. Today I printed out this post to have a hard-copy handy for cross-referencing as I worked on the long-promised summary, and it ran to 154 printed pages. So: By fiat, the challenge is closed. If you have something else to say, you'll need to do it in comments on another post.

Kerry's no Ike

In 1952, the incumbent President was not running for re-election, but the nation seemed bogged down in a frustrating war on the Korean peninsula — one that had see-sawed from near hopelessness around the Pusan pocket, to what might be termed "catastrophic success" after MacArthur's Inchon landing and American troops' advance almost to the Yalu River, to a humiliating retreat from the Chosin Reservoir after Red Chinese troops poured across their borders, and into a bloody stalemate along the 38th Parallel.  America had suffered almost 37,000 KIAs in the first three years of fighting in Korea; the new President would have to decide between withdrawal, continuing the stalemate, escalation (possibly including use of atomic weapons), or some other course of action.

Late in the campaign, on October 24, 1952, the Republican candidate delivered a speech in Detroit that Tom Wicker describes thusly in his 2002 short biography, Dwight D. Eisenhower (bracketed portions, italics, and elipses in original; at page 16):

In earlier years, [Eisenhower] had seemed to support President Truman's "police action" in Korea and also had approved Truman's decision to fire Eisenhower's old boss, General Douglas MacArthur.  Now, however, Eisenhower declared that immediately after the election, he would "concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war.... [T]hat job requires a personal trip to Korea.  I shall make that trip .... I shall go to Korea."

Ike the inexperienced campaigner had made one of the decisive strokes in American political history.  He carefully had not said what he would do about Korea, other than to see the war for himself, thus establishing at the outset his characteristic policy of "keeping his options open."  But from the hero of World War II, less than two weeks before the election, his mere pledge to "go to Korea" all but finished Stevenson and the Democrats.  Even Harry Truman, the old in-fighter in the White House, could only cry "politics" — but to little avail.

Fifty-two years later, the Democratic candidate for President is basing his campaign on the premise that America is again in a bungled military stalemate (despite the vastly shorter timeframe, one-thirty-seventh of the fatal casualties, and absence of a threat that the conflict will escalate into global nuclear war).  Like Eisenhower, John Kerry asks the American public to trust him — essentially on faith — to somehow "fix things."

Americans felt that they knew Dwight David Eisenhower — that they'd seen him tested, and liked what they'd seen, when he commanded Allied forces in Europe in their defeat of Nazi Germany.  He was elected with 55 percent of the popular vote and a 442/89 electoral college margin.  The North Koreans and their Chinese and Russian patrons rapidly backed down from their previous negotiating positions — perhaps because they thought Eisenhower would use nukes, perhaps because they knew he'd never tolerate years of stalemated conventional war — and on July 27, 1953, barely six months after Eisenhower's inauguration, an armistice was signed under the shelter of which South Korea has enjoyed a half-century of peace, liberty, and economic expansion.  Yes, there's still unfinished business on the Korean peninsula today, and the threat posed by the North Koreans is a grave one that will confront whoever wins the 2004 presidential election.  But the enormous trust conferred by the American electorate upon Eisenhower in 1952 would seem, by almost anyone's evaluation today, to have been well justified in hindsight.

The questions today, then, are these:  Do Americans, and does the world, think as highly of John Kerry's resolution and leadership abilities as they did of Dwight Eisenhower's in 1952?  Will our friends feel the same confidence in his word?  Will our enemies feel the same fear of his war-leading abilities?  Has Sen. Kerry earned, by his career accomplishments, the degree of trust that Americans gave Ike to fulfill a vague and open-ended promise of such critical importance?  Like Ike did, Sen. Kerry promises a change in course, without much detail.  American voters were willing to accept that promise, and that lack of detail, from Eisenhower.  But does John Kerry inspire that kind of blind faith, and can it be justified?

To ask that question is very nearly to answer it.  Behind the catchiest slogan in American political history — "I like Ike!" — was a profound and hard-earned trust and admiration.  Eisenhower had already won a war when he asked us to trust him.  He'd masterfully handled one of the most difficult military and political challenges of world history — benefiting, perhaps, from being "misunderestimated" at first, but ultimately winning world-wide respect and admiration.  John Kerry, by contrast, offers up a three-month combat tour as a junior officer that he bailed out of at his first opportunity, plus a consistent senatorial history as an opponent of the use of American military force, an undercutter of its and our intelligence community's strength, and a gratuitous insulter of America's best and most consistent friends abroad.

When John Kerry says, "Trust me and I'll fix things in Iraq and with the Global War on Terror" — what possible basis can you have to give him that trust, other than a faith so blind that it has become genuinely reckless?

Begging for snarky captions

Two-fer!  Sen. Kerry's apparently in a great mood this week, despite his head cold.

The camera just loves this guy, doesn't it?

Bonus points if you can write one snarky caption that fits both pix, but don't let that inhibit your creativity in coming up with separate ones.

Judicial Watch appeals Adm. Route's dismissal of its complaint

The echos haven't faded away, but I think the fat lady has basically already sung on Judicial Watch's challenge to John Kerry's medals.

When I was a law clerk for a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, one of my regular duties was to review, and advise my judge upon, pending petitions for rehearing en banc.  Then as now, each appeal in the Fifth Circuit was normally heard by a three-judge panel selected at random.  Before asking the US Supreme Court to overturn the Fifth Circuit's ruling, however, the losing side before the three-judge panel had the opportunity to petition the full Fifth Circuit — all of the judges acting collectively, "sitting en banc" — to overturn the panel's decision.  Statistically, the odds of success on a motion for rehearing en banc were slim indeed, but the procedure did give the losing side another "bite at the apple," and their odds of persuading the Supreme Court to even hear their case would be even slimmer.

In one of the most common types of petition for rehearing en banc, the losing side would attack the panel's written decision for failing to address specifically and negate every single argument that the losing side had presented to the three-judge panel.  "We raised thirty-two different points of appeal in our initial brief," these petitions would typically read, "and the panel's written opinion only discusses twenty-seven of those points!"  In the vast majority of cases, however, the unaddressed points — upon closer examination (which was partly my job) — would turn out to have been the weakest arguments anyway.  (Most of the time, in fact, they were arguments that a confident and focused lawyer would have left on his own cutting-room floor to begin with.)  The judges of the Fifth Circuit necessarily operated with a high degree of trust in one another — and their trust included a highly justified working presumption that no serious and substantive argument was likely to have been ignored altogether by all three judges who'd participated in a given panel decision.  Instead, almost all of the cases that were accepted for review by the full Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, involved serious legal issues that had been squarely and explicitly addressed by the three-judge panel and that, for whatever reason, a majority of the full court believed should be reconsidered.

On Thursday, September 23rd, with an accompanying press release, Judicial Watch filed its appeal from the September 17th decision of the Naval Inspector General, Vice Admiral Ronald A. Route, to dismiss without further investigation Judicial Watch's complaint requesting an investigation into Sen. John Kerry's medals.  It is a competent piece of lawyering, but unfortunately it reads to me all too much like one of the petitions for rehearing en banc that I've described above.  There's a quality of sputtering indignation — "How could Adm. Route have failed to talk about the Combat 'V' on Kerry's Silver Star?!?" and "Where's Adm. Route's citation of regulations to show that Adm. Zumwalt had authority to award one without the Secretary of the Navy's involvement?!?" (my paraphrases, not quotes) — that may indeed have been unavoidable for want of better arguments, but that is still unlikely to be very effective.  There's simply no due process requirement that a decisionmaker address each and every argument made by a litigant/complaintant in the degree of detail that the litigant/complaintant might desire; and the decisionmaker's failure to do so, by itself, is unlikely to impress a reviewing authority who begins with a predisposition to believe that the decisionmaker has given all of those arguments their due consideration.

Judicial Watch was wise to tone down its initial rhetoric — the appeal letter doesn't include the offensive phrase "whitewash," for instance, that Judicial Watch used in their press release immediately after Adm. Route's decision.  And I stress that Adm. Route's decision does not, and ought not, preclude further public argument on these subjects, notwithstanding Adm. Route's refusal to convene a more thorough investigation that would address their merits in a formal proceeding.  But I continue to expect that Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England is likely to reject Judicial Watch's appeal and affirm Adm. Route's exercise of discretion.

NYT bungles description of Kerry's 1970 Paris meeting, and publishes a Brinkley gaffe

Jodi Wilgoren's article entitled "Truth Be Told, the Vietnam Cross-Fire Hurts Kerry More" on September 24, 2004, in the NYT's Washington/Campaign section, contains this statement:

Mr. Kerry's nemesis, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, is spending $1.3 million in five swing states with a spot accusing him of meeting with the enemy in Paris — a reference to his trip to the Paris peace talks, where he met with both sides.

As I wrote at considerable length on Tuesday, Kerry didn't meet with "both sides," but rather with representatives of both enemy participants at the Paris peace talks, the North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong.  Ms. Wilgoren's article is also misleading in referring to this as merely an accusation by the SwiftVets.  It's not a disputed accusation, it's something that Kerry admitted — and arguably, bragged about — in his 1971 testimony before the Fulbright Committee.  And unsurprisingly, the Times continues to ignore the possibility that Kerry made at least one further Paris trip in late 1971, as pro-Kerry antiwar-movement historian Gerald Nicosia continues to insist despite the Kerry campaign's denials.

The same article contains this surprising statement by authorized Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley:

"Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was," said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and author of a friendly biography of Mr. Kerry's war years, acknowledging that Mr. Kerry's opponents had succeeded in raising questions about his service.

"It's kind of neutralized itself, just by tiring everybody out," Mr. Brinkley said.

Within hours, the Kerry campaign published a press release from Mr. Brinkley to respin this quote:

Author and historian, Douglas Brinkley, issued the following statement to correct a report by the New York Times today:

"A story in the September 24 New York Times leaves the false impression that I think John Kerry was not 'the war hero we thought he was.' Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a great American fighting man in Vietnam and deserved all of his medals. Over the past year I have vigorously defended Kerry's military record and will continue to do so.

"My comment was meant to be about the political consequences of the anti-Kerry Swift boat attacks vs. the anti-Bush National Guard ones. I was speaking about public perceptions not my personal beliefs."

Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

I appreciate the frank attribution on this press release; but it ought to also appear on Brinkley's book, Tour of Duty, and perhaps also be tattooed on Mr. Brinkley's forehead to help keep him in sync with the party line.

Update (Sat Sep 25 @ 2:12am):  Not content to get it wrong once, the NYT repeats its error:

Mr. Kerry has said he visited the Vietnam peace talks and discussed the status of prisoners of war with both sides.

That's not what he said in 1971, and not what he did in 1970.  Apparently the Times recognizes that a junior officer in the Naval Reserves meeting with the nation's enemies (plural) in wartime is hard to spin in a favorable way.  So they're just going to misrepresent the actual facts, repeatedly.  If you disapprove, feel free to email the Times "public editor," Mr. Daniel Okrent (politely, please).

Needs a snarky caption

This is one of the Senator's better recent photos, but still definitely snark-worthy. 

Per Reuters:  "Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry visits with children at the Angel Sprouts Academy daycare center in Orlando, Florida, September 22, 2004." But we can do better than that caption, can't we?

Burkett blames CBS News, Dubya, and the blogosphere

According to CNN, based on its email interview with CBS News' controversial source Bill Burkett, Mr. Burkett blames Dubya for the blogospheric storm over Ra^thergate:

Burkett also accused the White House of using the blog community to launch a "kill the messenger campaign" against him after the documents were made public.

Nor, in Mr. Burkett's view, did CBS News stonewall and bloviate hard enough during the storm:

"The coordinated attacks against the documents, then against me, which CBS did nothing to deflect or defend, and then against Dan Rather and CBS producer Mary Mapes have not been against the validity of the documents, but rather as an attack against anything being considered at all," he said.

But CBS News — truthseekers that they are — did, apparently, actively encourage Mr. Burkett to remain silent and not "out" himself as their source prior to last weekend:

[Burkett's wife,] Nicki Burkett said CBS News "asked us not to respond publicly in our own defense from the time we turned over the documents" until last Saturday, when a network vice president informed them that CBS no longer had any obligation to them.

Does Burkett have a sense of humor?

Burkett also said "the central part of my agreement with CBS was that they use their massive and superlative abilities to authenticate and verify the documents prior to broadcast in order that I and my source not have to be identified."

"CBS came to me, I did not go to them," he said. "It was in no interest of mine to be involved with this. Certainly as a source, I demanded confidentiality both for myself and my source."

Meanwhile, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Jack Douglas, in an article distributed by Knight-Ridder, reports from his own interview with Mr. Burkett that he claims not only that CBS News put the Kerry campaign into contact with him, but that Kerry campaign official Joe Lockhart vigorously sought copies of the documents  [update: the strike-throughs above and below are based on the Star-Telegram having issued a correction; see below — Beldar]:

He said, however, that during the meeting in which he gave the memos to CBS, he was also told by a producer that his phone number would be passed on to Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart.

"I was absolutely and clearly told that that was as far as anyone could go without crossing the line of (journalistic) ethics," Burkett said.

During a single phone conversation with Lockhart, Burkett said he suggested a "couple of concepts on what I thought (Kerry) had to do" to beat Bush. In return, he said, Lockhart tried to "convince me as to why I should give them the documents."

In case you've forgotten, on Monday Mr. Lockhart admitted to having called Mr. Burkett at the suggestion of CBS News producer Mary Mapes, but told a different story than Mr. Burkett's telling now:

Earlier, Lockhart said he thanked Burkett for his advice after a three- to four-minute call, and that he does not recall talking to Burkett about Bush's Guard records. "It's baseless to say the Kerry campaign had anything to do with this," he said.

Later, Lockhart said he was sure he had not talked to Burkett about the Guard documents.

And according to the what he told the Star-Telegram's Douglas, Mr. Burkett thinks CBS News is setting him up to be the "fall guy" through artful editing:

Burkett said he agreed to a taped interview with Rather on Monday as suspicion about the memos mounted, putting the network's reputation at stake. He said key portions of the interview were never aired.

"He snipped it apart to cover them," he said. "That's all that that evening news was — to find a fall guy. And it was me."

He added, "By his action and inaction, Dan Rather ruined my reputation in front of 70 million people."

I'm guessing that various dictionaries are competing vigorously over the right to publish Mr. Burkett's picture next to their next editions' entries for the term "loose cannon."  But for tonight, I have nothing else to say on the subject — check with me tomorrow, after I've finished my regular morning videoconference with Karl Rove and gotten my instructions on how to play this.

Update (Fri Sep 24 @5:08pm): The strike-throughs above are based upon the Star-Telegram having today issued a correction to its original story that reads:

This article has been corrected from the version published in the newspaper and online Friday morning to reflect that Bill Burkett was referring to conversations with CBS when he said, "They tried to convince me as to why I should give them the documents." The earlier version incorrectly reported that he had discussed the documents with Joe Lockhart of the Kerry campaign.

I've also changed the original title of this post to remove the ending, "— and disputes Lockhart."