Hmmm...

I wasn't going to say anything else about CBS' documents because, as I stated earlier, I think the whole thing is completely irrelevant and a waste of time. However, the story just got completely weird. Lt. Col. Killian's secretary has surfaced and says they are fakes, but accurate.

The former secretary to a Texas Air National Guard officer who purportedly wrote memos critical of President Bush's pilot service said Tuesday that the documents are forgeries but they appear to reflect memos her boss wrote and kept in a locked desk drawer. Marian Carr Knox told the Dallas Morning News after viewing copies of the disputed memos, "These are not real," and that "the information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones."

[...]

Another former Texas National Guard officer, Richard Via, also said that the documents were fakes but that their content reflected questions about Bush that were discussed at the time in the hangar at Ellington Air Force Base, where he had a desk next to Killian's. Via said he and others he worked with "remember the physical, and him going to Alabama was an issue." He said Killian "made notes and put them in his files about things like that." Killian kept the files because "he was trying to cover his ass," Via said. "He was always worried something would come back on him."

Interestingly, this is pretty much exactly what Stirling Newberry said was likely the case in his article to which I linked in my only other post on this matter. And Charles Johnson is still full of shit: these didn't come out of Microsoft Word, either. The baselines are off from letter to letter and I challenge anybody to reproduce that behavior in Word. I think the most likely scenario is that these were created on a more modern typewriter. By whom? Well, that's the big question, isn't it?

Here's hoping it gets answered soon, so that this dust-up can be put away. It was never anything more than a ridiculous distraction. We are approaching what is probably the most important election in my life and have now spent almost the entire campaign on issues of obscure documentation from a war that ended three-and-a-half decades ago. Could the national political discourse sink any lower?