September 10, 2004 -- THE populist revolution against the so- called
mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce
blogs on the Internet and their engaged readers engaged in the wholesale
exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against
George W. Bush.

What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question
the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a
much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60
Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.

These were "previously unseen documents . . . obtained by '60 Minutes,' "
the network bragged Wednesday night on its Web site. Their author,
supposedly, was Bush's squadron commander, Jerry Killian, who died 20 years
ago.

They "include a memorandum from May 1972," CBS reports, "where Killian
writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming
to drill from now through November.' " A document dated "18 August 1973"
complains that Killian is being asked to "sugar coat" Bush's record. "I'm
having trouble running interference and doing my job," the document says.

Liberals went wild with glee about the story, especially after the onslaught
on John Kerry's Vietnam record by his fellow Swift-boat veterans.

Kevin Drum, the most talented of the left-wing bloggers, wrote: "This story
is a perfect demonstration of the difference between the Swift-boat
controversy and the National Guard controversy. Both are tales from long ago
and both are related to Vietnam, but . . . in the National Guard case,
practically every new piece of documentary evidence provides additional
confirmation that the charges against Bush are true."

Drum simply assumed that the documents were above-board. So did The New York
Times and The Washington Post, both of which put the story on its front page
on Thursday.

They were doubtless swayed by the fact that CBS said " '60 Minutes'
consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the
material is authentic."

Maybe "60 Minutes" should have tried another expert or two.

CBS made the four documents available in their original form on its Web site
Wednesday night.

And by yesterday morning, they were being examined with a fine tooth comb.

The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early.
Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an
Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site the 47th posting on
the topic there.

Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents
from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was
proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that
effect back then.

From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience
writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was
impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been
crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.

Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply
typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and,
lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS
site, down to the letter spacing.

The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done
automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance
at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic,
reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces and none of them has curly
quotation marks.

By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces
invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying
flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."

Yeah, it had better. I thought on Wednesday that it was scandalous for "60
Minutes" to turn over a good deal of its time on Wednesday night to one Ben
Barnes, a one-time Texas political powerhouse who now claims he got George
W. Bush into the National Guard.

The problem is not, as some would have it, that Barnes has raised half a
million dollars for Kerry. The problem is that Barnes has already lied about
this on videotape, and I use the word "lied" without difficulty, where he
says he pulled strings for Bush when "I was lieutenant governor of Texas."

The thing is that George W. Bush was sworn into the National Guard in May
1968. Ben Barnes didn't become lieutenant governor until 1969.

From the lies of Ben Barnes to the apparent forgeries of
who-knows-who-did-it why has "60 Minutes" exposed itself in this way?

We all know why. Its producers and others in the media think George Bush
deserves to be beaten up now because of the beating administered to John
Kerry in August. In some weird way, the editors and producers believe this
is fairness at work.

Instead, they have unmasked themselves. Or rather, they have been unmasked
by ordinary people who can see what they and their hired experts evidently
could not.