Presuming it was him, the story would go like "I'll create a blatantly forged document that confirms a narrative that CBS wants to push and send it to them. I expect they will publish it immediately with no fact checking whatsoever, double down when called out on it, and the entire rest of the mainstream media will stick behind them."
Now if that's the story... I'm not saying Karl Rove is an angel or anything, but this seems like he's 10% bad and CBS news and every media source that stuck behind them is 90% bad.
The genius of what I'm accusing him of is this: the story itself was real (Bush going AWOL; taking advantage of his father's position).
Why not make a document that ostensibly validates that and bake in the fact that it was a forgery to be revealed so that all focus is on the forgery and not the facts that Bush shirked his service?
It's a brilliantly devious move and exactly the type of thing Rove would do (e.g., bugging his own office and then accusing his opponent of the misdeed, etc. etc)
I see what you mean better now. It still strikes me as rather odd though. The AWOL story never got all that much traction in the first place. Why undertake a high-risk plan to kill a relatively minor story? Theoretically, CBS could have identified the forgery, realized someone was trying to pull a dirty trick on them, investigated the source much more closely, and went live with details of that instead of taking it at face value. Unless of course he was so confident that CBS is completely incompetent and will do absolutely anything to push their chosen narrative that he thought there really wasn't any risk at all. If he did do it and thought that, he ended up being far more right than anyone could have imagined.
I distinctly remember the overall landscape of the time being that the mainstream media was constantly poo-pooing bloggers and internet sources for not having the "journalistic standards" of themselves. It's quite an attention-getter to prove by their own actions that their only real journalistic standard is keeping their positions of power and promoting a preselected narrative.
In the context of all that, it seems a little weak to whine that they were set up by a Republican dirty trickster. They had just spent the last few years claiming that they were the only news source that could be trusted because they were the only ones competent enough to properly fact-check sources exactly like that.
Now if that's the story... I'm not saying Karl Rove is an angel or anything, but this seems like he's 10% bad and CBS news and every media source that stuck behind them is 90% bad.