The "documents", Slate and Arrogance

OK, remember all the crying about how this administration is the most secretive ever? Well, maybe now we can see why that is a good thing.

Here is what timothy Noah from Slate said about it after confessing that he too rushed to judgment about the CBS documents:

The fact that the White House had sent the documents to me and to thousands of other reporters seemed to eliminate any possibility that they were fakes. (It turned out the White House was just passing along docs that it had received from ... 60 Minutes.) The only statement I can make in my defense is that the White House didn't seem to doubt their authenticity, either.

So, now they criticize the White House for being too open and free with info which might hurt the president? The White House made no judgment on the authenticity of the documents which contained the CBS fax header anyway. Perhaps, in retrospect, the White House should not have resent the docs to thousands of reporters without checking them out first. But, would they not have howled "coverup, secrecy!" I mean, that is what they charge anyway without any evidence.

kudos to Noah for realizing and saying that CBS in wrong here. But, he should not have tried to minimize his own mistakes-- and by implication the mistakes of other reporters.

unfortunately this moment of self-doubt was too short lived. Immediately after admitting that his knee jerk reactions were faulty he says:

Which brings us to a larger point. The documents were entirely consistent with everything that's already been established about President Bush's National Guard service. We know strings were pulled on his behalf to get in. We know that, for whatever reason, he wouldn't take a required physical.

These charges most clearly have not been established. That is why we are debating them. There were no strings pulled. There was along list of candidates for admission into the Guard, but there was not a long list of applicants who had qualified for Fighter Pilot Training. On the contrary. Further, how many times have you heard that Bush put in over 6 times the training hours required during his first year?

Note also the conspiratorial mind that leaps from "for whatever reason" to the conclusion that the reason is nefarious. Many Guardsman take months off with permission from their commander.

Finally, if mysterious documents show up years after reporters have been looking for them which prove everything that one side has been alleging the whole time, you are a fool if you don't think that it is too good to be true.

And they call conservatives arrogant!

[forgive the lack of citation: I am lazy]