Where's Dan Rather When You Need Him?

Well, it looks like that infamous "GOP Talking Points Memo" on the Schiavo case is being officially questioned, when Howard Kurtz is questioning it...

Fresh from declaring victory over CBS News and its discredited National Guard memos about President Bush, some of the same bloggers are raising questions about a strategy memo, first reported by ABC News and The Washington Post, that cast the Schiavo right-to-die case as a partisan opportunity for Republicans to stick it to Democrats.

"Fake but Accurate Again?" says the Weekly Standard headline on an article by John Hinderaker, an attorney and conservative blogger who had challenged the CBS documents.

While there is no hard evidence that the memo is fake, there are several strange things about it, including the basic fact that no one seems to know who wrote it and that the noncontroversial part of it is lifted from a Republican senator's press release.

ABC and The Post say their reports on the Schiavo memo were accurate and carefully worded. The document caused a stir because it described the Schiavo controversy as "a great political issue" that would excite "the pro-life base" and be "a tough issue for Democrats," singling out Florida's Sen. Bill Nelson. Two days after the memo was reported, the Republican-controlled Congress approved a bill, signed by Bush, to transfer jurisdiction of Schiavo's case from Florida courts to the federal judiciary in an effort to restore the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube.

"There's nothing on the face of the document to identify a source -- not only is it unsigned, there's no letterhead, no nothing," Hinderaker said yesterday. "This is literally a piece of paper with stuff typed on it that could have been written by anyone."

The controversy erupted March 18 when veteran correspondent Linda Douglass reported on "World News Tonight": "ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators, explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case."

Two days later, a Post article by Mike Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia said: "An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters."

Neither report said Republicans had written the memo, although they may have left that impression, and they included no comment on the memo from party leaders. ABC's Web site went further than Douglass's on-air report with the headline: "GOP Talking Points on Terri Schiavo."

In the flood of commentary after the reports, some bloggers even speculated that the memo could have been a Democratic dirty trick.

... A Democratic Senate official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the party is not publicly discussing the memo's origin, said: "It's ridiculous to suggest that these are some talking points concocted by a Democratic staffer. The fact is, these talking points were given to a Democratic member by a Republican senator." Democratic aides, in turn, gave the memo to reporters, as the New York Times reported last week.

I suppose the Democrats couldn't have simply concocted the memo, right? Nah, they would never do something like that. Here's some of Hinderaker's article in the Standard...

Questions about the genuineness of the memo intensified when, later the same day, the far-left website Raw Story published, for the first time, a JPEG version of the scanned memo, which it said "[a] source on Capitol Hill has leaked." The print version of the memo, as posted on Raw Story, was identical to ABC's "exact, full copy of the document," except that the four typos that ABC had identified with a "sic" were all corrected. Interestingly, however, the fifth typo--"applicably" instead of "applicable" in the sixth paragraph--which ABC did not so identify, was not corrected in Raw Story's "leaked" version of the document.

THESE MYSTERIOUS CORRECTIONS raised obvious questions. Who created the second, corrected version of the memo? Why would they have taken a Republican-created memo and re-typed it, eliminating typographical errors, before "leaking" it?

More basic features of the memo also raised questions. There is nothing on the face of the memo to indicate who authored it. Contrary to normal congressional practice, not only is it anonymous, but it is on plain white paper, not the letterhead of any congressional or Senatorial office. It could, literally, have been created by anyone.

What, then, was the evidence for the claim that it was created and distributed by Republicans? As far as the public record shows: There is none. On the contrary, the only published report identifying the purveyors of the memo on March 17 states that they were Democrats. The New York Times reported on March 22:

As tensions festered among Republicans, Democratic aides passed out an unsigned one-page memorandum that they said had been distributed to Senate Republicans. [emphasis added]

...To sum up, then: (1) The memo itself conveys no information about its source. (2) It is very poorly done, containing a number of typographical errors, failing to get the number of the Senate bill correct, and using points cribbed word-for-word from an advocacy group's website. (3) The politically controversial statements are out of place in a talking points memo, and seem, on the contrary, ideally framed to create talking points for the Democrats. (4) Somewhat bizarrely, after the contents of the memo had been reported, someone corrected those typographical errors--but only those errors that had been pointed out by ABC. (5) No one has reported seeing any Republican distributing the suspect memo; the only people confirmed to have passed out the memo were Democratic staffers.

It's pretty sad when the memo doesn't even fool Dan Rather, yet ABC and the Post ran with it, since it had been "distributed to Republican politicians." As loyal reader RB pointed out, this leaves room for much mischief. I'm wondering when people will start "distributing" memos to Democratic politicians advocating beastiality.

Not that I would ever encourage such behavior.