The Republicans appear to have latched on to the drama surrounding the maybe-authentic-maybe-not documents that suggest Bush’s National Guard Record wasn’t so stellar. In fact, they gone so far as to accuse CBS (which procured and first reported on these documents) of fraud:
Rep. Christopher Cox, of California, delivered a letter Wednesday to the chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Internet saying CBS used the memos “to unfairly damage [Bush’s] reputation and influence the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.”
“Despite the growing abundance of evidence that CBS News has aided and abetted fraud, the network has declined to reveal the source of the disputed documents,” Cox said.
[…]
On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called on CBS News to say where it got the memos.“I understand that people want to protect their sources, but we’re dealing with the alleged forgery of government documents to influence a presidential race during war,” DeLay told reporters. “This isn’t politics as usual. It’s dangerous and possibly criminal.”
Let’s hold up a second now. First off, no one has conclusively proven that these documents are either real of forged. Nonetheless, quite a bit of the people that make up the GOP are ready to put the board of CBS behind bars for such a heinous criminal act that could upset the balance of this war. Yet, the Bush administration started this war by presenting what were proven to be faked documents and using them as the basis of their claim that Iraq was caught up in bad, bad business and we should storm in, guns blazing, and expose Saddam’s dastardly plans. Oh, and by the way, despite the fact that we’ve levelled Iraq, we still haven’t found any WMD.
So, reporting on maybe-forged documents about Bush’s cavalier National Guard past is a major, horrific crime, but passing off proven forgeries to start a war and order more than 1,000 troops to their deaths in a country where their presence isn’t wanted by anyone is… what, just a minor boo-boo?