The 6 Most Obvious Lies People Got Famous Telling the Media (Rathergate #2)

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.....#2. Bill Burkett and the Badly Faked Bush Documents

Right before the 2004 presidential election, CBS and USA Today received documents from Bill Burkett, a former lieutenant colonel in the Texas Air National Guard. They were military memos showing that when George W. Bush was in the National Guard, he failed to perform his duty and used his father's influence to improve his record. Armed with this incriminating evidence, "60 Minutes" ran a story on it.

To get a sense of how little fact-checking it'd have taken to debunk the documents, the Internet figured out they were fake pretty much during the broadcast. And the source wasn't George W. Bush's National Guard brothers defending his honor -- it was font nerds on message boards defending the natural laws of time and space.

You see, the documents allegedly typed in 1972 and 1973 used proportional fonts, something that you see every day now that a typewriter at the time might have called "sorcery." Another way to put it is that the documents suspiciously lined up perfectly with the default settings of Microsoft Word 30 years into the future.



Even if CBS' newsroom was staffed entirely by people too young to know what typewritten documents look like, they still had plenty of reasons to at least raise an eyebrow. Burkett wasn't exactly some impartial source who popped out of the woodwork -- the guy went around posting anti-Bush messages on Internet forums. He handed them the documents two months before the election. No matter how badly you want to believe in the inherent goodness and honesty of your fellow man, maybe run that shit by somebody who would know how to spot a forgery. And in fact, the network kept stubbornly insisting they were real. It took CBS a week to figure out they made a mistake, which was far longer than it took seemingly every other person in the world.

So you might be wondering, what did Burkett have to say for himself after being caught in such a stupid, obvious lie?

As you probably guessed, he made up some more stupid, obvious lies. He claimed to be some kind of innocent middleman -- mysterious people were just handing him documents to hand to other people. The names of those people changed several times, and apparently it was only a weird coincidence that the forged documents discredited a man Burkett publicly hated. The point is, Burkett is such a terrible liar his children never got a chance to believe in Santa.

After his hilariously flimsy hoax was exposed, Burkett fought back against the allegations by threatening to sue. Incredibly, his lawyer, David Van Os, suggested it didn't matter if the documents were fake since, for all we know, they might say things that are actually true. It's very similar to telling the police "My wife was probably going to fall down the stairs anyway" or "How can you be sure that drifter wouldn't have broken into my basement, undressed, and chained himself to that radiator?"....

http://www.cracked.com/article_22174_6-terrible-liars-media-believed-made-famous_p2.html