CBS now admits that the Bush documents are “probably” forgeries - Killian’s secretary says she did not type those memos.

Right-wing Bloggers rejoice and proclaim victory over the biased media.

Funny thing, though.

While many bloggers have written extensively on Marian Carr Knox’s exposure of the forgerie, there hasn’t been any comment on the other part of Knox’s interview: the part wherein she says that the memos, while phony, accurately reflect memos she DID type. She says that Killian was very upset that Bush did not report for his physical and that Bush seemed to think that the Guard rules did not apply to him.

I thought we were damning people for selective reporting.

This answers my earlier post of questions about the scandal: Why didn’t the Bush people deny the contents of the memo?

Because Bush did refuse to follow an order and was suspended from his flying duties. Since Bush has stated that he only stopped flying when his unit transitioned to new equipment, it appears that the President did lie.

Analphilosopher has done an admirable job defining “lie” in a way that absolves Bush of many other missteps. For instance, when Bush signed a jury selection form certified that Bush had never been arrested even though he had a DUI, that wasn’t a lie because Bush’s staffer actually filled out the form and Bush didn’t read, and thus had no intention of lying. Bush didn’t lie about using connections to get into the Guard because he didn’t know that connections had been used by his father or other political operatives toadying up to his father. I know. It’s convoluted. But if it turns out that Bush was suspended for cause, I find it unlikely that he had forgotten and misremembered the reason he lost his wings. I’m looking forward to the Analphilosopher’s justification for this one.

Right-wing bashing complete, let me turn to the left.

Duck, Rob!

The paucity of documents about Bush’s Guard career does not, I repeat, does not indicate a cover-up. The fact that pay records and dental records and flying records and OER reports are missing or incomplete is not the result of some nefarious Pentagon cover-up.

The records are missing because that sort of thing happens. Officials misfile, destroy, misplace and otherwise lose records.

I have faced this myself as a researcher. As part of my master’s thesis, I traveled to Ripon, Wisconsin to look at jury service records*. The Courthouse’s archivist told me that the records had been transferred to the town library. The town librarian told me that the records had been transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So I drove a few more hours and learned that the records had been destroyed (!) after being transferred to microfiche. Hey, no problem - I wasn’t very concerned about the validity of these records - who would go to the trouble of forging jury lists from 1850s Ripon? So I head to the microfiche librarian. Who could not find them. Many records were purged to make room for new collections in the 1980s, but there was no record indicating whether the Ripon records were part of the dump. Was it a plot to derail me from getting an MA? I hardly think so.

Was that example too obscure? How about an example from military service?

I better not ever run for office. My foes (probably financed by the Maximum Leader) will comb through my military records looking for dirt. My medical records, like the president’s, won’t be easy to find. About three months before I got ye olde honorable discharge, my unit was given our permanent medical files to review for accuracy. Microfiche forms, x-rays, etc. I was busy with some silly officer task, so I just stuck my folder into my briefcase. Later on during the drill, I finished some paperwork for my civilian teaching job and dropped the graded essays on top of the medical file. When I was handing back papers the next Monday, I found the file. Oops. Well, I thought, I better not lose this. So I stuck it in the back of my file cabinet so I wouldn’t get it mixed in with school papers.

Two years later, I took a job in Virginia. As I cleaned out my file cabinets I came across the medical file. The Army didn’t seem to have missed it and it would have been a lot of trouble to find out who to send it to. So I tossed it.

The absence of these records will prove to the future MoveOn.Org supportrs that the army is covering up some horrible Smallholder war crimes.

By the way, I think the same sort of thing happened during filegate. Republicans make a big deal about records that were misplaced and later found. Hell, I challenge any reader of NakedVillainy to pull out your financial records of a failed investment that you made in 1994. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Next post: I reveal that I, like the President, violated an order to take a physical.

The horror! The horror!

* The explanation of jury records that follow is of interest only to history geeks. Do not read any further.

I was looking for support for my thesis that assessed the intellectual tolerance of non-mainstream ideas during the serious flux of the 1850s as Americans who rejected both the regimentation of the factory system and the barbarism of the slave system sought a third path on which to organize communities. The former members of the Fourier phalanx utopian community integrated surprisingly well into the local milieu when their experiment collapsed. Their daughters intermarried well - generally moving up census-revealed wealth deciles in their selection of husbands. Former Fourierists ran successful (as measured by years of operation) businesses. Former Fourierists were elected as officers in the volunteer Civil War regiments. This evidence indicated that they were not held as outside the pale by more traditional villagers - their daughters (even though tainted by the crazy Fourierist idea of sexual equality) were sought after, people were willing to do business with ex-communitarians, and their potential for battlefield leadership was respected. But I wanted to see if they were trusted in governmental positions. Since there were only a handful of individuals elected to countywide offices, the percentage of Fourierists and traditional politicians wouldn’t be a very reliable guide. So I was looking for jury records - jury participation was not random in Wisconsin in the 1850s - jurors were selected from respected members of the community. If the jury lists (a favorite tool of social historians) revealed that Fourierites were proportionately represented on juries after a control for wealth-decile membership, it would be a pretty good indication that their judgment in civil affairs was respected.