SubscribeLittle Green Silly People
One of the new words the right wingers have seized on is "kerning." They're obsessed that the "kerning" on the CBS memo is exactly the same as the "kerning" on an identical version typed into Word. The idea is that typewriters of the time which used proportional fonts still didn't have any kind of kerning mechanism. That might be somewhat interesting, except for the fact that by default kerning is not turned on in Microsoft Word, and not used in the Word Document made by Charles Johnson of LGF (I won't link, you can find it yourself. He'll likely just set up a redirect if I do. The basic info is here at Tech Shill Station.)is not created with the kerning turned on.
Word Doc is here.
To see the difference kerning makes - and it does make a small difference - highlight all of the text, go to format, font, character spacing, and click the kerning box.
More Forgeries Wow! It appears that a lot of these documents (not all) from 1963 must be forgeries!
Executive
I'm not going to spend the day arguing about fonts and typewriters, because the whole thing is so goddamn stupid, but what kind of "experts"
in this are are unable to do a google search in 5 seconds and discover that IBM had been marketing a basic typewriter with proportional spacing sincethe late 1940s1941 (thanks Melic!).
And, here's the Selectric Composer.
...more
Kos also never addresses any of the substantive issues: the absurdity, on its face, of writing a memo whose subject heading is "CYA;" the memos' inconsistency with various military usages of the early 1970's; and, most of all, the anachronism in the August 18, 1973 memo, where Killian allegedly writes: "Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush." Brigadier General "Buck" Staudt retired in 1972.
Kos never mentions any of these facts.
Nor does Kos mention the fact that Killian's widow, his son, and the personnel chief of his National Guard unit are all on record saying that they think the documents are forged, and do not reflect Killian's views. Or the fact that Killian's own evaluations of Bush contradict the memos. Or the fact that Killian's signature on the faked memos doesn't match his real signature, as shown on documents that are indisputably authentic.
Kos also exhibits no curiousity about the provenance of these documents. If they didn't come from Killian's family, where did they come from? Who ostensibly squirrelled away a handful of papers thirty-one years ago, apparently on the off chance that Lt. Bush might be President some day? Inquiring minds want to know, but CBS won't say.
Independent document examiner Sandra Ramsey Lines said the memos looked like they had been produced on a computer using Microsoft Word software. Lines, a document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, pointed to a superscript -- a smaller, raised "th" in "111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron" -- as evidence indicating forgery.How can they put that in their own report and then go on and say they stand by the memos? Serious cognitive dissonance. I'm no fan of warblogs, but defending an obvious forgery just makes liberals look stupid.
"I'm virtually certain these were computer generated," Lines said to the Associated Press after reviewing copies of the documents at her office in Paradise Valley, Ariz. She produced a nearly identical document using her computer's Microsoft Word software.
All I say is, all CBS has to say is where do these documents come from. - Bob Novak, 09/10/04
Unfortunately for the tinfoil hat crowd, this nutty theory is based on a simple mistake made by ABCNEWS regarding the timezone of a time stamp on an internet site. ABCNEWS failed to note that the time stamp was Pacific time. Based on this simple mistake, ABCNEWS falsely concluded that internet posters had posted their doubts about the documents before the program had ended.
Once that mistake had been made, it was a short hop to the sinister conclusion: the posters could not have seen detailed mistakes in the documents before the 60 Minutes program had even ended. They must have done the forgeries themselves!
ABCNEWS has since corrected the mistake. However, the crazy theory has been picked up by the sloppy "journalists" at NPR, and is also being perpetuated by the lunatics at Media Matters, who have yet to note ABCNEWS's correction -- and indeed are even now continuing to quote the original, mistaken version.
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anyway, look here
posted by donth at 3:00 PM on September 10, 2004