John Podhoretz writes another column on Rathergate today. He says:
Anybody who spends an hour reviewing the evidence and the expert testimony knows they’re forgeries.
The discrediting has gone on now for five straight days. The conclusion isn’t just overwhelming, it’s inarguable.
The documents aren’t just forgeries, they’re bad, blatant, ludicrous forgeries. They’re forgeries so easily detected that in the space of a few hours after CBS released computer photographs of them on the Internet, they had already been pegged and deconstructed.
And adds:
Fifteen years ago — maybe even five years ago — the world would simply have accepted the legitimacy of the documents. After all, CBS said it had gone to an expert to have them authenticated.
Well, this isn’t the old days. And for reasons largely consigned within the peculiar brain of its anchorman, Dan Rather, the CBS news division is refusing to face the reality that it has been caught out in the most significant forgery scandal to hit journalism since the Hitler diaries.