If the text seems intimidatingly massive, here's the gist: Many reporters working on the AWOL tale have relied on one Albert Lloyd, a retired Air National Guard official who claimed that "all Bush needed to do was get 50 'points' per year, and that Bush had done so." Researcher Paul Lukasiak argues that Lloyd isn't telling the truth.
Interesting, no? Dan Rather gets pounded for believing Burkett, yet no-one criticizes the writers at George magazine who didn't double-check Lloyd.
More troubling still is the rightist reaction to David Hailey, the expert who proved a point which (ahem!) I had been making for quite a while: That the CBS documents, authentic or no, were not created on a computer using Microsoft Word.
How did the right-wing bloggers take the news? They went batshit crazy and attacked the messenger.
But the debunking quickly turned into name-calling, with a guest blogger at Wizbang, a conservative political blog, leading his detailed critique with the since-retracted accusation that Hailey was a "liar, fraud and charlatan." It escalated as Hailey updated what he calls a work in progress and his critics declared a cover-up.You have to feel sorry for Hailey. He probably didn't expect to play the role of Emmanuel Goldstein.
The result was what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, calls "a semi-organized swarming." It is but one of a spate of recent incidents that underscores the power of a rapidly mobilized group online to accomplish a goal -- and the potential for harm when online mobs form...
...At first, Hailey thought it was funny that his type-matching exercise ticked people off enough for them to write. By the second day, he was far from amused. By the end of the week, the tenured academic literally cried in relief when university officials called him to a meeting to express their support; many of them had received numerous e-mails demanding his dismissal and calling him a liar or a fraud.
"It's one thing to go to a university and point out that there are these problems," Hailey said. "It's another thing to start character assassination."
If you want a whiff of unadulterated hate -- it hits you with the wallop of pure ammonia -- check out the anti-Hailey screed here. This commentator does not sign his work, but whoever he is, he writes like someone attempting to pose as an objective scientist even though he just consumed 25 cups of expresso and a dozen Krispy Kremes.
Worse, his own illustrations undercut his argument -- look carefully, for example, at the position of the "th" superscript.
I've conducted this comparison myself. Just fire up Microsoft Word, type in "111th," and compare the results to
1. the Killian memo,
2. the Hailey examination, and
3. the version that appears on Mr. Coffee's site.
What you'll see on your screen will look a lot like Hailey's example -- and not at all like the dubious version you get from Professor Juan Valdez, or whoever the hell he is.
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