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He also alleges that Viacom lost his pants.

One of the Swift Boat ads had a doctor claim that one of Mr. Kerry’s purple hearts was from a superficial wound, a mere cm of metal. How can that doctor remember such an insignificant event over close to 40 years, but nobody remembers Mr. Bush’s physical. And nobody remembers having the priviledge of drinking beer with the young Lt. Bush, but lots of people wanted to drink with canidate Bush.The Swift Boat Doctor wasn’t the doctor of record for any of John Kerry’s awards.

CBS’s internal report of Mr. Rather’s report gives blather a bad name, and I would like to see a trial where the claims about fonts and “th”s are put to the test. My understanding is that none of the hooting holds up.

Mr. Rather’s report was just that – a report. It was not a criminal trial, and his responsibility was to do a reasonable investigation,which he did. Only God is omniscient.

Since William brought it up, who is the doctor of record for John Kerry’s awards? Has Kerry ever released his service records to the public? I thought he was supposed to a couple of years ago.

Mr. Rather’s report was just that – a report. It was not a criminal trial, and his responsibility was to do a reasonable investigation,which he did

That’s part of the problem. All indications are that he (or at least CBS) did not. They ignored experts that believed the document was false, and pressed on with the story.

William:

Rather was …only responsible to do a “reasonable investigation”

That is a pretty low standard for the one of the most highly compensated anchors of all time and for someone allegedly entitled to $70m for not being allowed to continue producing other “reasonably investigated” reports.

Should not a report based on a “reasonable investigation” contain at least some verifiable facts other than that Bush was in the reserves and occcasionally had fun, all of which was thoroughly reported, “reasonably” four years earlier?

Rather should be held to a standard at least as high as Ken Lay for example, who also believed he conducted a “reasonable investigation”, and had he survived his ordeal, may have had thoughts of pursuing legal action against those that gave him a “bad name.

The Swiftboat doctor wasn’t a physician; I think he was a medic.

And I love the idea of CBS either proving the documents real or phony.

heh.

I don’t know how we got onto the subject of Kerry’s Vietnam record, but the person I recall commenting about his Purple Heart wasn’t a doctor – it was a medic who remembered that Kerry wouldn’t allow him to treat a minor wound and insisted on a doctor to pull the splinter and apply the disinfectant and bandaid – having it treated by a doctor made it Purple Heart eligible.

I will note that many minor wounds are actually PH eligible under the regulations, but most soldiers scorn getting one for a non-disabling wound. My retired Special Forces pal tells of being offered a PH after being nicked by a grenade splinter; he threw away the paperwork. It goes back long before Vietnam; one of Bill Mauldin’s WWII cartoons had a grimy front-line soldier telling the medic, “I already have a Purple Heart, just give me the aspirin.”

My opinion of Kerry’s purple hearts is based on common sense. One PH for a minor wound makes a man a little bit medal greedy, three times without getting hurt badly is suspicious. Most three-time PH winners come back in a coffin or a wheel chair. Kerry was never even admitted to a hospital that I know of. Either he was incredibly lucky or he was a glory hound.

As for the credibility of the swift boat crowd, I haven’t seen much evidence that they were lying, so it’s their word against Kerry’s. (Aside from Kerry’s Christmas in Cambodia tall tale, when he listened to a speech by President Nixon while Johnson was still President, in a place that all available records seem to show that Kerry could not have been…)

I can see that the swift boaters, and any other Vietnam veteran, would have a strong reason to lie if they didn’t know true derogatory stories – Kerry came home, found that being a war hero (synthetic or not) was no longer a political advantage in Massachusetts, and told some terrible lies about his fellow servicemen at the Winter Soldiers hearings. Which makes it the swiftboater’s word against a known liars – and as far as I’m concerned, makes it irrelevant anyhow, because his lies after the war made him forever utterly unfit to be Commander in Chief.

As for Rather: He not only ignored the experts who doubted the documents and went shopping for one who knew nothing about verifying type script but would say that the copied signature was not inconsistent (or something like that), but Rather had to also ignore his own memory of what typewritten documents looked like. At 75, Rather must have worked a couple of decades as a journalist when everything was done on a typewriter – and that memo is very, very far from the look of typewriting as done by a well-trained career typist, let alone by an executive level officer typing a secret memo to himself.

Stop making sense. That only makes the Other Side feel bad.
One more comment and then I will stop: The Swifties have yet to be sued; the statute of limitations passed in August and Kerry let it go.

Which would actually clue me in, with his recent comments about about Gen. Petraus, that someone is giving him some excellent advice and he is following it.

Back to CBS: The irony of this is so palpable as to be
alive. Rather is blaming CBS for letting him commit professional seppuku?

“I’d like to know what really happened,” Dan Rather said.

He’s as clueless as a blind woman in a burka at midnight.

/sign me up