A conversation deep in the bowels of Republican election headquarters August 2004…
Deep Font: Mr. Rove, I received your request to come here.
Karl Rove: Yes. I’m glad you could make it here so quickly. We have an assignment that should be a perfect match for your skills. We know that this fall the Democrats will discover how the President exploited his family connections to avoid military service in Vietnam and skipped out on what little duty in the National Guard was required of him. What we need to do is to discredit such reports before they gain any traction.
Deep Font: How can we do that? We know that the major media have all their investigative reporters interviewing Bush’s old acquaintances and they will be scouring whatever records we have not managed to destroy.
Karl Rove: Simple. We will give the media and their Democratic allies what they want.
Deep Font: Did I hear you right?
Karl Rove: Yes you did. We will give them want they want, but not quite the way they want or expect it. I want you to forge documents from the 1972 era that will feed unspoken speculation about Bush wanting to avoid a physical examination to keep his drug habit from becoming public. I want the documents to suggest that Bush’s superiors were being pressured from above to give Bush sparkling evaluations. I want these documents to be leaked to the media.
Deep Font: I still don’t understand. Wouldn’t such information damage the president’s re-election chances?
Karl Rove: It could slightly, but only if the reports are allowed to linger and sink into the public consciousness. This is where your particular expertise comes into play. I want the documents to appear at first blush to be authentic, but under any serious scrutiny they should be transparent forgeries. When the fact they are forgeries becomes apparent, the media will be discredited and anything they find subsequently will lack credibility.
Deep Font: Yes I could do that. I could use proportionally-spaced fonts and use modern line spacing. Gosh, I could even use a smaller font for superscripts, things that would be hard to accomplish using the common typewriters of the era. However, no reasonably skeptical reporter would fall for this. Who would be so transparently partisan, so willing to believe that they have found evidence of a Bush scandal, that they would abandon natural journalistic skepticism?
Karl Rove: I am surprised you have to ask. The answer is CBS News and Dan Rather, of course. The people at CBS are either too young or too anti-Bush to be properly skeptical. Such memos would play right into there preconceived notions. Some of the producers were not even born in 1972. They probably would not recognize the documents as forgeries if we told them they were private e-mails or cell-phone records from 1972.
Deep Font: If the media are that credulous, isn’t it possible that the forgery will not be realized until after the election?
Karl Rove: Yes, that could be a problem. I’ll just have our digital black shirts use blogs on the Internet to publicize those features of the documents that make them obvious forgeries. With Fox News and the Weekly Standard, knowledge of the forgeries will trickle into the main stream media. Once they smell blood in the water, the mainstream media are like sharks and will go after their own. They will quickly validate to the non-Conservative community that the documents are forgeries. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, CBS will stand behind the story long after it is painfully obvious that the documents are not authentic. No, I am being to optimistic. Not even Dan Rather has been that blinded by zeal.
Deep Font: I can easily arrange for the documents. All I need is a word processor and to photo copy the originals a dozen times. Well I hope it works. You know, sometimes these ideas blow up in your face. Remember, when we funneled money to the Howard Dean campaign and he thought they were Internet contributions. What a chump. Well, he didn’t win the nomination.
Karl Rove: Yes, you’re right. I expected Dean to self-destruct after, not before, he secured the nomination. We went ballistic way too soon. However, when he did explode, he tainted the Democratic field with a Left-wing, anti war stench. We ultimately did almost as well getting John Kerry to run against. The Bushs are pretty good at beating Massachusetts Liberals in national elections. We would have had a harder time against Joe Lieberman. Dean whipped the Democrats into such a frenzy, that they never would have nominated a genuinely thoughtful candidate.
Even if I do say so myself, I did outdo myself with back-door funding of Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11. Democratic partisans ate it up like gummy bears in kindergarten class. Mom and Pop Middle America are now convinced that the Democrats have lost their collective minds. It could not have worked better.
Deep Font: What do you want me to do with Osama?
Karl Rove: Keep him on ice in case Bush looses the debates with Kerry. We may need him yet.