an article in the dallas observer about how mary mapes, formerly of cbs news, was treated by the rightwing blogosphere, and how the rightwing blogosphere was first, wrong, and second, how they behaved about it.

i can't think of the right words to talk about that last part, but here's an attempt.

a few years ago, i was idly looking for another job. i liked the one i had just fine, but maybe a fabulous job would pop up, you know? so i was looking around. and there was a job that i was qualified for at the local planned parenthood. me, i'm all for parenthood, all for having it be planned, and all for a woman's right to choose, plus pretty decently qualified for the description. so i thought "oh! i should apply!". and then i thought "oh, wait. that position is located at the planned parenthood location where they do abortions. where the antichoicers take pictures of the cars that park in the lot. and pictures of the staff. and look up their home addresses. and post it all on the internet in hit lists. and oh, shit." then i dithered about it for a while, and the job posting went away, and the decision had been made for me.

what does this have to do with documents that weren't actually forged? not a lot, on the surface. but i'm hoping that you'll see a connection in the ways that people react to them.

anyhow. on to the article. a quote pulled from it to appease the part of me that is hopping up and down and saying "nyah nyah told you so."

dallasobserver.com | News & Features | Schutze | Mapesgate | 2005-11-10:

Another telling point to recall is that not even the high tribunal and commission set up by CBS to explore the issue was able to corroborate the accusations of fakery. For all the money CBS spent on its commission, not to mention various private detectives--and for the amount of public bloodletting the network justified on the basis of the commission's findings--you have to think they would have found a way to call those documents fake if they could have.

That was the core accusation against Mapes, Dan Rather's producer for that story: that she bought off on fake documents and fooled her superiors. If CBS could have proved the documents were fake, then all the blame would have been on Mapes and much less of it on CBS.

Certainly on the technical side of this I am not a good arbiter. And I'm not entirely neutral on Mapes herself. But I can say this much for her book: Anybody with an honest intellectual curiosity about this story will have to read the book or find some other way to confront the arguments in it. Mapes' evidence supporting the authenticity of the Bush Guard documents is compelling enough to put the ball squarely back in the court of her accusers. The case for forgery is dead in the road until it finds a way around this book.