Same Team, Same Team

Last week as a throwaway at the end of this post, I asked,

And if you were the DNC, would you put out a new ad this week which features the reporting of Dan Rather?

Of course you would.

The last sentence was a link to a Weekly Standard article about the DNC's new ad, "Operation Fortunate Son."

Now it's starting to make a little more sense. As USA Today reports there seems to be an ever greater level of coordination between Kerry's camp and CBS than I suspected.

CBS arranged for a confidential source to talk with Joe Lockhart, a top aide to John Kerry, after the source provided the network with the now-disputed documents about President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard.

Lockhart, the former press secretary to President Clinton, said a producer talked to him about the 60 Minutes program a few days before it aired on Sept. 8. She gave Lockhart a telephone number and asked him to call Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guard officer who gave CBS the documents. Lockhart couldn't recall the producer's name. But CBS said Monday night that it would examine the role of producer Mary Mapes in passing the name to Lockhart.

Burkett told USA TODAY that he had agreed to turn over the documents to CBS if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign.

The network's effort to place Burkett in contact with a top Democratic official raises ethical questions about CBS' handling of material potentially damaging to the Republican president in the midst of an election. This "poses a real danger to the potential credibility ... of a news organization," said Aly Colón, a news ethicist at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

"At Burkett's request, we gave his (telephone) number to the campaign," said Betsy West, senior CBS News vice president.

[...]

The White House said CBS' contact with Lockhart was inappropriate. "The fact that CBS News would coordinate with the most senior levels of Sen. Kerry's campaign to attack the president is a stunning and deeply troubling revelation," said Dan Bartlett, White House communications director.

To Bartlett's "stunning and deeply troubling" I'd add totally stupid. Now I'm sure both parties coordinate with various media people much more than we're privy to on a regular basis, but the "fakeness" of the "thrust" of this story puts the Dems really way out on a limb.

Jim Geraghty pieces together some of the timeline.

The CBS story based on the memos the evening of Sept. 8. Are we to believe that the Democratic National Committee put together "Operation Fortunate Son," in which these memos are front and center, entirely in the hours after the CBS report, and yet had their campaign ready so that these memos are referred to in the first words of the AP story Sept. 9?

Are we to believe that the DNC didn't know ahead of time what was in those memos, and how they could be used to attack the president?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not a lawyer. Would this qualify as circumstantial evidence that CBS and the DNC were collaborating on using the memos before the story ran?

And would this explain why Terry McAuliffe said yesterday that no one at the DNC or Kerry campaign, 'had anything to do with the preparations of the documents,' but said nothing about the distribution or dissemination of the memo?

Oh — and did no one at the DNC look at these documents and say, "Gee, these look like they were written with Microsoft Word"?

And they complain about FoxNews' bias!

UPDATE
Captain's Quarters:

First, let's consider the obvious. We now have CBS personnel pimping their sources to the Kerry campaign in order to do what -- coordinate the smear piece with timely attacks from leading Democrats? If you'll recall, a number of people commented on how quickly Democrats such as Tom Harkin and Terry McAuliffe seemed to get a grasp on the material. Now it appears that Lockhart gave them all a head start ... with a huge assist from CBS.

Wizbang:

DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The Commissar:

"Baseless." ... "Baseless." Democratic activist and forger Burkett talked with two leading memeber sof Kerry's campaign, at the time that these documents were being created and sent to CBS News, and Lockhart tries to call this connection "baseless." He employs the "tuna noodle casserole" defense.

Vodka Pundit:

That's the tipping point. This is officially a major political scandal, not just an embarrassment to a dinosaur news outlet.

CBS is toast. Dan Rather is toast. Joe Lockhart is toast... and John Kerry is burned French toast about to be tossed out in le dumpster.

Stick a fork in all of the above. They're done.