Powerline has done some more excellent investigative reporting on yet another fake memo, this time the supposed “GOP talking points memo” about Terri Schiavo. The bloggers at Powerline were able to locate a copy of the memo and determined that it contained material copied and pasted from a pro-life website and was riddled with factual errors.
This whole setup smells. The Democrats have been using this memo in their talking points for some time now, yet no one has been able to authenticate the letter, it comes completely unsourced, it isn’t formatted in the way an actual GOP strategy memo, and it is riddled with basic factual errors.
One would think that after the massive scandal at CBS, reporters would actually be able to adaquately source and verify random memos that fall on their laps. Yet here we are with the media once again running with an unsubstantiated allegation backed by documents of dubious origin. Will the media ever learn?
Can you give some background info about that memo? What it allegedly says, who refers to it in what ways? I’d appreciate it.
J.
> Will the media ever learn?
That all Republicans are such gentle, caring souls that they would never, ever exploit a private tragedy for public gain? Maybe they’ll learn it when it actually becomes true.
At any rate this is the first I’ve heard about this “memo” despite the Shaivo saturation on the internet and radio. So I doubt this is as big a deal as you breathless post would have us believe.
Janek: Power Line has a scanned copy of it. Supposedly it was a big talking points thing about how the GOP could score political points on the Terri Schiavo case. It’s not on official letterhead, no Senator seems to have ever heard about it, and it gets the number of the bill wrong. If it was a memo, it wasn’t anything official, and there’s a good chance the whole thing was a crude fake.
> It’s not on official letterhead, no Senator seems to have ever heard about it, and it gets the number of the bill wrong. If it was a memo, it wasn’t anything official, and there’s a good chance the whole thing was a crude fake.
Who, exactly, are these incompetent, inept forgers that you’re so certain inundate the Democratic party?
Does that really seem reasonable to you? That this would be the second time the dastardly plan of a forger is foiled by the oversight of a crucial, obvious, and easily researched deal?
Does that really seem reasonable to you? That this would be the second time the dastardly plan of a forger is foiled by the oversight of a crucial, obvious, and easily researched deal?
Sadly, yes, it does seem plausible to me, given the adolescent shenanigans of the left in the ’04 elections.
Of course, if the news media were a little more willing to publish their sources, and a little more willing to investigate their red-meat pieces, we wouldn’t have to react with such suspicion.
> Sadly, yes, it does seem plausible to me
Because Democrats are idiots? Try to give us some credit. If we wanted to forge a document, you can be sure we’d google the right bill number, and type it on the kind of typewriter they had back then.
You don’t think the ideological camp with all the nutty leftist university professors, journalists, seniors, and librarians might stop for a minute and say “hey, did they even have Microsoft Word in 1960?” Or know how to look up the number of a bill?