Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

CBS fails to recognize its story line has also been discredited

NY Times:

...

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said in a statement issued by the network. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."

This tortured languaged is used to avoid confessing that their story had no merit. Later, Howard is quoted:

"The editorial story line was still intact, and still is, to this day," he said, "and the reporting that was done in it was by a person who has turned in decades of flawless reporting with no challenge to her credibility."

In fact the editorial story line had been disputed by several witness in a much better position to the know the facts than Mr. Burkett. Colonel Killien's family said the memos did not reflect what the man told them about President Bush. More importantly ABC's interview with Colonel Stoudt blew away the whole premise of the program. He said he ws never contacted by Ben Barnes to get Bush into the Guard unit, and that he was the one who selected him based on a personal interview and review of his file. He also disputed that he had ever put any pressure on anyone evaluaating Bush and that there was no need to since he was a very good pilot. The Dallas Morning News had also reported that Stoudt was no longer in the guard at the time he was alleged in the memos to be putting pressure on Killen. Then there is the internal inconsistency in the memos where Bush is supposedly "ordered" to take a physical before regulations required one. It is clear that CBS's story line has also fallen apart, but the network is stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that fact.