The documents and CBS' own pathetic efforts to line up "experts" to defend their authenticity have been so thoroughly destroyed that they could be referred to in an imaginary headline as "CBS' offer of news division for MOAB testing deemed success". Now we are told, paraphrasing the report that Brit Hume just gave on Fox News' Special Report, that CBS has interviewed Killian's 81-year old former secretary, an admitted partisan for Kerry, and found that she, too, is willing to put words in the mouth of a man who died 20 years ago and say that while the documents are obvious forgeries, somehow the spirit of them is true.
Well, at least CBS has found an "expert" that it will put on the air to debunk the documents.
However, instead of drawing back to report on itself, and how it was mislead and why, CBS plows on. It takes the word of partisans who have been disavowed--the secretary by Killian's family and some of his fellow Guardsmen--and Barnes who has been outed by his deposition in a Texas Gtech trial and his own daughter. No admission that the family was right--as were the blogosphere and some of the MSM elements who saw through the forgeries.
The comparisons to CBS reporting on the "flawed" WMD intelligence and CBS' stonewalling on the forged documents are enough to make one double over with laughter. I love Scrappleface's headline quoting Tenet as telling Rather that the documents are a "slam dunk".
If this stonewalling continues--in the face of overwhelming fact and the founding tenets of journalism after the days of the "yellow sheets"--after the evening news and 60 Minutes II tonight, we'll have a new nickname for Dan: Richard Milhouse Rather.
Update: Instapundit found this excellent take on CBS' public statements on the scandal.
