The Bush National-Guard Story Rises from the Dead
By Charles P. Pierce
at 11:44AM

Joe Hagan's exhaustive exhumation, in this month's Texas Monthly, of the story regarding George W. Bush's on-again, off-again relationship with his sworn duty to the United States military — which was complicated, as so many things were in the life of C-Plus Augustus, by his mostly off-again relationship with the truth — has been ping-ponging around the Intertoobz for a couple of days now. As near as I can judge, three things are made plain by his reportage:

3) That, at least partly, Dan Rather got pretty badly hosed. Remember how the controversial memos got debunked because people studied the spacing and the letter fonts on them, and concluded that neither the spacing nor the fonts were in use at the time the memos allegedly were written. Well, Hagan got one of the prominent advocates of that theory to admit that a lot of it was moonshine....

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn't exist on typewriters of the early seventies... In any case, MacDougald's arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, "It's ironic that the blogs were actually wrong...We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing, And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it's really hard to say, but there were come typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn't seem as though they would hold up."

But they did hold up. Dan Rather got destroyed. The story died. And the Bush campaign was freed up to tell atrocious lies about John Kerry's military service. I'd say they held up pretty damn well, actually.