So it turns out that Clifford May, the former RNC communications director now posting at NRO’s The Corner, is using a phony document — an email purporting to come from a Marine in Iraq, but which has never been attributed to an actual human being and in any case has been around for more than a year — to argue for the proposition that things are actually going well in Iraq and that the disaster there is a myth created by the mass media.
Of course, that doesn’t prove that things aren’t going well in Iraq. False arguments are sometimes offered in support of true propositions.
Still, I recall that Glenn Reynolds and the Powerline crew, when they were hammering Dan Rather for using what turned out to be bogus documents in support of the true claim that George Walker Bush had been less than minimally diligent in carrying out the duties of the National Guard assignment that kept him out of Vietnam, had nothing but contempt for those of us who acknowledged the falsity of the documents (as Kevin Drum did promptly) but insisted that the claim was still true, and that there might indeed have been real documents with the same content as the phony documents. They used the catch-phrase “Fake, but accurate?” as if it were the mantra supplied by their common TM teacher.
Well, fellas, howsa bout? Now that a document pushed by a substantial journalist on your side turns out to be grossly bogus (at minimum, May gave no hint that it was at least a year old, and no one has ever produced the Marine who was supposed to have written it), are you still prepared to believe that the disaster in Iraq is just a media fantasy?