One of the rhetorical cows whirling around in the Alito tornado is a talking-points memo from the DNC that allows an inference that the Italian-American judge was soft on mobsters. I don’t think the passage as written rates the indignation that it’s roused in some quarters. But what’s fascinating to me is the way the unsigned memo was nailed back to the DNC because the people who put it out appear to have been ignorant of their own computers.

The metadata clearly indicates that the author of this goes by the name “prendergastc”, most likely Chris Prendergast, who works on the DNC. By displaying the document properties in Word, one finds out that the company holding the license for the copy of Word that created the document is — the DNC. The last person to edit the document was AdlerD, which Redstate thinks would be Devorah Adler, also of the DNC, and who makes considerably more than Chris Prendergast does. That moves the problem from an out-of-control flunky to one of deliberate smear attempts by the Democratic Party itself.

There’s a bit more here, too. The document comes from a template that was created on July 7th, which coincides with the nomination of John Roberts. The document/template title? “how they made their $$, personal holdings, the whole deal”. Talk about operating from a playbook!

In a similar fashion, some of the top brass at the U.N. were hoisted by their own cookies last week when they watered down the official report on Syrian involvement in the Hariri assassination in Lebanon.

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials.” But the original submitted version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed.” Maher is Syrian President Basher al-Assad’s brother, al-Shawkat is his brother-in-law, and the others are core Syrian regime officials.

How do we know the deleted names? Computers!

Mr Annan had pledged repeatedly through his chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, that he would not change a word of the report by Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. But computer tracking showed that the final edit began at about 11.38am on Thursday � a minute after Herr Mehlis began a meeting with Mr Annan to present his report. The names of Maher al-Assad, General Shawkat and the others were apparently removed at 11.55am, after the meeting ended.

Neo-Neocon comments:

I know those editing programs. I’ve done some free-lance editing, and have been required at times to track my changes. It’s a nifty little thing where your edits show up in blue or red or whatever color you happen to choose. When you send the document, there’s a version that looks normal, and then with one magical click the removed material suddenly appears–usually with a strikeout line though it–and the additions leap into color. Very helpful for the top editor to see what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, without having to perform a laborious line-by-line comparison.

But computers are such funny things–one little click of the mouse and you can make the Mother of All Errors. You can send an e-mail to the wrong person–to spouse instead of lover, to boss instead of friend. Or, in this case, the wrong version of an e-mail to the wrong person. Big trouble in either case, private or public.

And it all has echoes of the very juicy typography lesson we all learned in Rathergate.

Computer data has a kind of immortality — a perverse statement coming from someone who’s routinely flushed some of his (self-described) best writing into the void by hitting the wrong button on the furshlugginer Dell keyboard.

Michelle Malkin brings up another example, sent in to her by the family of one of the 2,000 dead Americans that the New York Times rolled up into its massive mournful “Grim Milestone” coverage. Here’s what the Times chose to quote from Corporal Starr, killed on his third tour of duty in Iraq: “I kind of predicted this. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.”

But his family, via MM, wanted you to read the whole paragraph he wrote in that letter, which they found on his computer after he died. Their request is here honored:

Obviously if you are reading this then I have died in Iraq. I kind of predicted this, that is why I’m writing this in November. A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances. I don’t regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom, now this is my mark.

No doubt there’s a pair of boots with Corporal Starr’s name attrached to it, travelling the nation in that piece of theater aimed at people who only read the New York Times quotes, and, ironically, titled “Eyes Wide Open.”