The Rather Implosion

It appears that CBS news anchor Dan Rather (D-TX) has been duped by someone into showing forged documents on 60 Minutes II on wednesday night. Mr. Rather, to his defense, states:

MANY OF THOSE RAISING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CBS DOCUMENTS HAVE FOCUSED ON SOMETHING CALLED SUPERSCRIPT... A KEY THAT AUTOMATICALLY TYPES A RAISED "TH". CRITICS CLAIM TYPEWRITERS DIDN'T HAVE THAT ABILITY IN THE 70S. BUT SOME MODELS
DID....IN FACT, OTHER BUSH MILITARY RECORDS ALREADY OFFICIALLY RELEASED BY THE WHITE HOUSE ITSELF SHOW THE SAME SUPERSCRIPT. [sorry about the ALL CAPS]

Indeed, defenders of these documents state that they could have been done on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter. Okay, they could have. One problem though: in order to justify text, the typist would have to type the text twice; once to set the justification, and another to load the text.

Improbable.

So Dan is left sputtering to high heaven that the documents are real. And the good people at the Kerry camp are demanding that President Bush come out and address the charges.

Ladies and gentlemen, as the good people at Powerline point out is where the wheels fall off of both Kerry/Edwards and CBS.

The bounce

Okay, I was wrong. The protesters on NYC were far better behaved that I expected. But it seems in retrospect, that their reasonable good behavior was driven by a fear of NYC finest coupled with the distinct impression that they were standing on the deck of a sinking ship. The President's bounce actually started before the convention and continues to this day. The always interesting Dick Morris, stated for the record this week that the polls showing Bush up only by 5 to 7 points are wrong and explained why:

The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.

So, couple the Swifties -- who did so much damage to Mr. Kerry during August -- with the terrorist mayhem in Russia and Dan becoming unhinged and you have a trifecta for Mr. Bush.

At least 40 states go for Bush in Novemeber, with a possibility of running to table if these forged documents came from the DNC or an allied 527 group [read " libel","actual malice" and "actionable"]. This has shades of being a Democratic Party Watergate. And after the election, the Republicans will be in no mood to play nice.