Things are nuts right now

Ben Barnes' own daughter claimed during an interview on Dallas radio that her father lied on 60 Minutes. Another blog confirms the story.

So now you have 60 Minutes interviewing a liar and using forged documents to "expose" Bush's "privileged treatment" in the Guard. In addition, Lt. Col. Killian's wife claims he couldn't type and all his notes were hand written.

On top of that ABC News is carrying the story of the forged Killian documents as is the Associated Press. (The sharks are in the water, and its feeding time.)

The American Spectator reports that the forged documents may have been given to CBS by the Kerry campaign, who got them from the DNC, who got them from "a retired military officer". Most damning of all is this

A CBS producer, who initially tipped off The Prowler about the 60 Minutes story, says that despite seeking professional assurances that the documents were legitimate, there was uncertainty even among the group of producers and researchers working on the story.

"The problem was we had one set of documents from Bush's file that had Killian calling Bush 'an exceptionally fine young officer and pilot.' And someone who Killian said 'performed in an outstanding manner.' Then you have these new documents and the tone and content are so different."

The CBS producer said that some alarms bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story. "This was too hot not to push. If there were doubts, those people didn't show it," says the producer, who works on a rival CBS News program.

Now, the producer says, there is growing concern inside the building on 57th Street that they may have been suckered by the Kerry campaign. "There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps, figuring we'd do the heavy lifting on the story. That maybe they had doubts about these documents but hoped we'd get more information," says the producer. "If that's the case, then we're bigger fools than we already appear to be judging by all the chatter about how these documents could be forgeries."

So it appears that CBS ran with the story despite the fact that there were doubts about the authenticity of the documents.

Tomorrow should be an interesting day.