As much fun as the 60 Minutes/documents business has been (and who doesn’t love in depth discussions on fonts?) it’s interesting and frustrating that a far more significant story was bumped and may not ever run as a result. According to Newsweek, mere hours before a fairly weighty story on the fraudulent Niger uranium documents was to air on 60 Minute’s II it was pulled in favor of the TANG story. LINK
One unexpected consequence of the network’s decision was to wipe out a chance—at least for the moment—for greater public scrutiny of a more consequential forgery that played a role in building the Bush administration’s case to invade Iraq.
Of course Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris were on this in the Washington Monthly first, but a major playing in big media would have been very nice.
Listen, I love red meat as much as the next guy, and I do think that Bush’s TANG service and lack thereof is worth giving a good look in that it, along with his less than sub par record as a student/businessman/governor, gives us some understanding of the man who became such an utter failure as president. The fact that 60 Minutes fucked up is frustrating, because there is a very well documented story there that doesn’t rely on those documents one bit. That story is not going to get talked about.
That said, the TANG story is all well and good but it really doesn’t hold a candle to fact that our president and his government relied, in part, on obviously forged documents to sell us on a needless and disastrous preventative war against a tin pot dictator squatting on a 3rd world disaster area who couldn’t have done shit to us. That is what got bumped and the fact that anything would bump somthing so crutial to understanding our current situation is just another example of the vomit inducing state of the SCLM.
On second thought, maybe he could have made spitballs out of the cocktail napkins that his nuclear weapons “plans” were scribbled on.
