Here’s the latest desperate spin from the left, already being pushed on CNN by Terry McAuliffe (and immediately picked up and parroted by Smirky):

The hot rumor in New York political circles has Roger Stone, the longtime GOP activist, as the source for Dan Rather’s dubious Texas Air National Guard “memos.”

The irony would be delicious, since Rather became famous confronting President Nixon, in whose service a very young Stone became associated with political “dirty tricks.”

Reached at his Florida home, Stone had no comment.

This is another one of those whacked-out theories that relies on its intended audience to be gullible morons.

If you’re trying to convince someone that forged documents supposedly from the 1970s are genuine, you don’t just type them out with the default settings of Microsoft Word and run them through a copier twice.

There are pretty high stakes in this game; is it even remotely plausible that Stone, or anyone else, would have tried to pass off such incredibly inept forgeries as real, when the whole game depended on the patsy (CBS News) believing they were genuine? How could a GOP operative have known that nobody at CBS—not an editor, not a producer, not Dan Rather himself—would notice the obvious fraud?

You wouldn’t have to be an evil genius to drive over to the local pawn shop and pick up an old typewriter for a few dollars, and create something that would be much harder to recognize as a fake.

The theory is ridiculous on its face.

But that hasn’t stopped these people yet.

UPDATE at 9/21/04 5:59:03 pm:

Smirky checks his referrer log.

Professional hate-monger Charles Johnson is calling me names again. How cute. I suppose he had to remove his hood to get the words out.

The really funny part of this (and I’m talking hilarious here): check out what young Ollie linked to as proof of my “hate-mongering.” He’s too dense to realize he linked to a parody of the Nazi-smear quiz that one of my stalkers put on the web. He just remembered seeing a great smear involving Nazis, did a quick Google, and came up with a post that defends me. And didn’t even notice it. What a maroon. (Watch him change it now to point to the real one.)

I don’t think George Soros is getting his money’s worth from Smirky.

UPDATE at 9/21/04 7:22:40 pm:

As amusing as the Oliver Willis sideshow is, here are some other facts about Roger Stone, the guy being touted as a “GOP operative” by McAuliffe and the shills.

Stone left the Republican party sometime after 1996, when he resigned from the Dole campaign in disgrace after he was revealed to have sought a sex partner in a swinger’s magazine. Then he declared himself an independent.

Last year, Stone emerged as a financial backer for Al Sharpton, having loaned the Reverend’s campaign a couple hundred thousand dollars.

In 1986 he called the elder George Bush a “weenie” and was blacklisted by the party leadership. In 1992 he was quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times calling Young Republicans at the party’s convention in Houston “Hitler youth.”

The Republican party spit this guy out long ago.

UPDATE at 9/22/04 12:30:14 pm:

And don’t miss Smirky’s latest, in which he changes his link (as I predicted above) to another post that defends me.

I was going to snark at young Ollie again, but you know … I’m actually starting to feel a little sorry for him. He’s trying so hard.