Thomas Sowell announces the first winner of his Joseph Goebbels award. (Hat tip: Allah.)

Having been on the receiving end of too many such slurs from the idiot left, I’m not usually fond of Nazi analogies. But in this case, the comparison fits like a proportional font.

This year’s Joseph Goebbels award goes by a narrow but decisive margin to CBS News anchorman Dan Rather for his planned broadcast on “60 Minutes” — just days before the election — to discredit President Bush’s National Guard service 30 years earlier. Leave aside for the moment the fact that discrepancies in the documents he relied on have convinced experts and many others that they were forgeries. Why was what George W. Bush did or didn’t do 30 years earlier “news” in 2004?

It was news by Dr. Goebbels’ standard — something that could lead to desired political reactions by the audience. Waiting until it would have been virtually impossible for an effective answer to be made before election day was in the same Goebbels spirit. Had the documents been real, Dan Rather would still have been a strong contender for the award. The fact that virtually everyone, with the notable exception of Mr. Rather, now regards those documents as fake — instead of simply “not authenticated” — makes Dan Rather the clear winner of the Joseph Goebbels award for 2004.

It is not necessary to believe that Rather knowingly used phony documents. It seems more likely that the political opportunity was too juicy to resist just because some document experts pointed out some problems with the typing and other details. It is the purpose that is decisive, so that even honest people are eligible for this award. We have to be inclusive.