This is a missive I posted on Sept. 21, 2004 right after the Rather story broke. In some ways it is Karma Time for Dan Rather for all those years that, by his own admission, he went along to get along and get promoted, he did not ask penetrating questions, he fawned all over those in power and said they deserved the benefit of the doubt etc.
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This was posted on a site for scholars that I used to post on once in awhile. It is still on their website.
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Tue, 21 Sep 2004 12:07:36 The Poison Pill
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It is an old intelligence game--"the poison pill"--that works the reverse of the old "salting the mine" (planting a bit of gold to make a barren mine look potentially fertile). When a story is getting out of hand and causing a threat to elements of one's own base (e.g. National Guard and Reserve Troops possibly getting turned off with the preppy moron's favored treatment when he was sort of in the Texas Guard), you plant some documents that appear authentic and are potentially quite damaging to your own cause; let the scoop-obsessed media run with it for awhile, then pull the plug at a propitious moment showing that the planted documents are forgeries thus "poisoning" not only the documents but the whole story as well. The whores (with all due respect to "sex workers") in the media, whose own spiral of SUCKcess in media requires access to get the next scoop, in order to get more exposure, in order to become a bigger name, in order to get even more expanded access... will apologize all over the place for having ben sucked in with forged documents and the story then shifts to the forged documents not what the documents were about and whether or not the CONTENT of those documents was correct or who indeed passed those documents in the first place.
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During the 1980 election the same thing was done with the October Surprise story. When the evidence mounted that Reagan-Bush had cut a deal with elements in Iran to keep American hostages until after the election to deny Carter an electoral victory, and when "respected" analysts like Gary Sick were joining in so that it became more than just another "conspiracy theory", up stepped Richard Brenneke (who had real bona fides as a former CIA Contract pilot and indeed a pilot for Poppy Bush) to say that he had flown Bush 41 to a secret meeting in Paris that Bush claimed he never attended. It all looked very lethal and damaging for Bush 41 until, supposedly to research the story, a novice reporter was given access to Brenneke's personal papers, including gas receipts, and, voila, this novice reporter, "discovers" a gas receipt showing Brenneke in Orergon on the day he claimed to have flown Poppy Bush to Paris. The story explodes, Brenneke is thoroughly discredited, and all of a sudden the WHOLE story, irrefutable facts and all, is discredited and consigned to the realm of nut case "conspiracy theory."
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The CBS story about Bush's illustrious Guard "service" is nothing more than but a replay of this previous "poison pill" scenario with a compliant mainstream press and a lot of really dumb people falling into line and taking their eyes of the irrefuatable facts and their real implications.
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