Ohiocore

The genius of the Bush administration's positioning regarding the National Guard CBS documents is already evident. They were able to take a factual set of criticisms and make them off limits by calling out the forgery of referenced documents. They knew whatever documents CBS viewed had to be forgeries, because they had themselves *already sanitized* files from that time during W's gubernatorial race. So now we go from a story where 1st hand accounts like the former Texas Speaker of the House and Lt. Governor saying "I got W into the Guard as a political favor to an oilman connected to the Bushes" (true) or "W failed in his Guard duties" (also true), to "CBS is a bunch of lying idiots"(now apparently partially true). This conversion is purely beneficial to W's campaign.

That's genius, in many respects. But, but wait, it gets worse. Check out MSNBC's
The Story That Didn't Run about what was bumped for the Nat'l Guard segment. Remarkably, the "other story" comes after 6 months of research and preparation, addressing the Bush administration's counterfactual assertion of an Iraq/Niger "yellow-cake" connection. That assertion relied on equally poor and prima facie implausible forgeries, handed in by Italian businessman Rocco Martino to Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba: "Within two hours, using the Google search engine, IAEA officials in Vienna determined the documents to be a crude forgery."

Some CBS reporters, as well as one of the network’s key sources, fear that the Niger uranium story may never run, at least not any time soon, on the grounds that the network can now not credibly air a report questioning how the Bush administration could have gotten taken in by phony documents. The network ould “be a laughingstock,” said one source intimately familiar with the story.

Recall this is the same Niger "yellow cake" as the Valarie Plame incident. Remember that? Yeah, the Pres. is doing everything in his power to help that investigation along, just like he said... should see results any day now, I'm sure...

The Niger case gets rather interesting, too:

At the urging of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into the Niger documents in an effort to determine if the United States government had been duped by a deliberate “disinformation” campaign organized.... One striking aspect of the FBI’s investigation is that, at least as of this week, Martino has told associates he has never even been interviewed by the bureau [FBI] —despite the fact that he was publicly identified by the Financial Times of London as the source of the documents more than six weeks ago and was subsequently flown to New York City by CBS to be interviewed for the “60 Minutes” report.

Here's hoping somebody airs the damn thing...