Memogate: We Lost our Way

It seems to me we have lost sight of something rather obvious with regard to the Bush TANG memos dispute.  It is simple:

If you have not held the original memos that CBS has, your opinion is quite irrelevant.

This includes all the posters on Kos, but I am not trying to slight the hard work people have done trying to refute the "proof" that Freepers and "experts" have proffered. Rather, I am pointing out that there should have been no need on the part of Kossacks to refute these amateur charges. And I mean amateur not just in the nature of the charges, but the nature of those bringing the charges.

No serious expert would make a definitive statement about the validity of the memos without examining the original source that CBS has (which is itself apparently a photocopy). This is simple common sense -- if one wants to make anything other than idle speculation, they must work with original sources.

Which brings me to my second point: how did obviously partisan and biased idle speculation morph into questions about the authenticity of these documents? There is only one opinion worth anything here, and that is the opinion of the expert that had his hands on the CBS originals.  We know what his conclusion was.

"Typefacegate" always was and always will be nothing other than a smokescreen.  The null hypothesis is that the documents are valid.
There have not even been any tests of the null hypothesis.  Think about that.  This is only a story if a credentialed expert, who had their hands on the CBS originals, concluded that they are fakes.  Not only is there no such conclusion, there has not even been such a test!

Yet, the media is a-buzz with speculation about the documents' authenticity.  That is serious:  the so-called "liberal media" is entertaining the idle speculation of partisan hacks and "experts" willing to make judgments second hand.  This USAToday story is an excellent example of this phenomenon. It attributes equal weight to the CBS expert that has seen the actual documents and an "expert" that is making idle speculation second-hand. It also reports settled matters of fact (could the documents have been made by a typewriter of the era) as merely the assertion of CBS, giving equal weight to a second-hand expert who is flat-out wrong.  Matters of fact are not partisan, damn it!

Until the left addresses the ability of the right wing noise machine to control the news cycle and, indeed, create a complete -- and false -- alternate reality for millions of Americans, I fear there will be no progress in taking our country back from Republican extremists.

In the meantime, what should be the focus of this issue -- the memos' content and provenance -- is now completely forgotten. Is it just A-OK to have a commander in chief that disobeyed a direct order for no other reason than he felt like it? Why have these memos not been released earlier? Is someone in the White House involved in a cover up? Were Bush's records scrubbed? How did completely baseless claims from a LGF goon make it to the "liberal media" in 24 hours?

Questions to which I fear we may never get the answer, because our opponent has the ability to control the news.  I fully expect this story to be a "scandal" rather than a matter of fact from here on out. Which is a rather demoralizing victory on the part of the right. Especially when you consider their claims were completely baseless to begin with.

I can only hope the work we are doing here on Kos can make a difference.