In an astoundingly bad move, CBS News continues to insist that the Killian documents are genuine.

I’m almost certain that at least some people at CBS are aware that these documents are fakes. Phonies. Forgeries. And stunningly inept forgeries, at that.

At some point, they’re going to have to admit it; but right now it looks as if they simply don’t care about the truth, and are trying to ride out the scandal, assuming that most people can be bamboozled by their inept excuses.

The seriousness of what happened here cannot be overstressed. Someone deliberately forged documents, in an attempt to interfere with a presidential election in a time of war, and CBS News rushed these forged documents into release—apparently with almost no serious attempt to verify their provenance. Compare this with the way the entire mainstream media utterly ignored the Swift Boat Veterans stories, for almost a month. The only conclusion one can reach is that CBS rushed the Killian documents out because they saw a chance to hurt George W. Bush, and this blinded them to the possible consequences of tying their reputation to such obvious forgeries.

Some have suggested that these documents may have been “planted” by the evil Karl Rove (cue sound of horses whinnying), to make news media and Democrats look bad. But if you were going to plant false documents, wouldn’t you spend considerable effort to make sure they looked real, so your intended patsy wouldn’t immediately notice that they were created with Microsoft Word?

Of course you would. The “false flag” theory doesn’t hold water either.

I suspect the person who created these fake documents is young enough to have no experience with the typewriters of the 1970s, and stupid enough to think that hastily created MS Word files (with all the MS Word signature characteristics) would be enough to fool the entire world.

I think we have a very strong contender for Idiotarian of 2004, in the moron(s) who failed to notice that MS Word automatically converts “187th” to “187^th.”

But regardless of the stupidity of the perpetrator(s), using fraudulent documents to influence a presidential election is very serious business. There needs to be an investigation, and the longer CBS stonewalls the worse it’s going to be for them.