rush22

It's interesting that you cheer that the power of the lefts' lies hasn't dwindled.

BTW - who elected Rumsfeld?

rush22: There should be no presumption...

I should have said something like: one shouldn't start with a false premise which is that if they can't be proven one way, then they are the other.

/or something along those lines

CBS put their source for the memos in touch with the Kerry campaign. Nah there was nothing wrong with that. CBS has admitted since the story ran that the memos are probably false, but the lady writing this article is blaming the bloggers???? The problem boils down to this CBS wanted to believe the memos and it clogged their judgement.

Columbia Journalism Review: produced by the Columbia School of Journalism...a fine producer of MSM types for many years...and current home to so many Liberal professors, Ted Kennedy would feel like a moderate.

That said, it is impossible to hold the bloggers to the same standard as the MSM. Really it's apples and oranges. No blogger has a staff of fact checkers, only their fellow bloggers to tell them they are wrong and why. All this goes on out in public for all to read, unlike what might go on in a typical MSM newsroom.

CBS screwed the pooch on this one, and anyone who is intellectually honest will admit as much. The documents were forgeries, pure and simple, and whatever assertions CBS wanted to make about Mr. Bush's military record (however irrelevant to 21st century America they might have been) were immediately null and void. Think of CBS as the "prosecutor" who's key piece of evidence at a trial was just thrown out. Case dismissed.

What CJR and everyone else including the bloggers *should* have learned from all this is that *credibility* still matters. If you assert it, you'd best be able to prove it, or you can and most likely will be called on it. That's the way that the American media is suppose to work. No one was ever just suppose to take the MSM's word for anything.

--h

Tinian

rush22

It's interesting that you cheer that the power of the lefts' lies hasn't dwindled.

That's not what I'm saying, and either you know that and are just an annoying troll, or you're one of the people I'm talking about in my previous post (brain-dead partisan entranced by their own convictions).

BTW - who elected Rumsfeld?

Who cares?

Mr. Bush's military record (however irrelevant to 21st century America they might have been)


Gee, that's real funny seeing how conservative bottom feeders seemed to think that Kerry's military records were not "irrelevent" to 21st century America.

Mr. Clarence Butterworth

"Mr. Bush's military record (however irrelevant to 21st century America they might have been)
Gee, that's real funny seeing how conservative bottom feeders seemed to think that Kerry's military records were not "irrelevent" to 21st century America."

Clarence my man we argued this over and over. Kerry made Vietnam his central issue. Kerry, "Bring it on" Well someone brought it on and questioned him about it. Edwards said that if you wanted to know about Kerry to talk to the guys he served in Vietnam with. Well someone did and they didn't have a lot of good things to say. If Kerry would have STFU about Vietnam he could have won.

Hang On Voltaire

The problem boils down to this CBS wanted to believe the memos and it clogged their judgement.

That's probably right, that kind of thinking seems to be the theme of both the media and the US government.

"Groupthink," where an assumption is absorbed into the group as fact but without qualification, is one of the conclusions the Senate Intelligence Committee came to regarding the mistakes in pre-war intelligence in Iraq. In CBS's case, their groupthink was that the memos were real. Though they didn't have any solid proof to back up their claim, they assumed they were, and began to treat them as if they were real. In the US government's case, their groupthink was that Iraq had WMD, though they too didn't have any solid proof.

//http://intelligence.senate.gov
///http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Kerry would have STFU about Vietnam he could have won.

Baloney.

Kerry, "Bring it on" Well someone brought it on and questioned him about it.

Yeah, paid perjurers on the gravy train with serial liar John O'Neil.

Blogging - Any redneck in a trailer can speak his mind on the internet.


This is why nobody cares about bloggers.

/5 years in the past due to time warp? replace 'bloggers' with 'internet petition'.

This article is a not-so-thinly veiled agenda-piece. Total BS and laughably unworthy of the label "journalism."

The intarweb that Gore invented finally has a real use! Enforce journalistic integrity from the outside... no wonder Old Media is upset. Someone is actually monitoring and criticizing in real time - PUBLICLY.

Oh woe is journalism! What a sad state of affairs, when journalists are being forced to do what they claimed they were doing all along - reporting facts after carefully verifying them! Reporting straight news! EGADS! The sky is falling!

hdhale:
That said, it is impossible to hold the bloggers to the same standard as the MSM. Really it's apples and oranges. No blogger has a staff of fact checkers, only their fellow bloggers to tell them they are wrong and why. All this goes on out in public for all to read, unlike what might go on in a typical MSM newsroom.

And bloggers cry in their beer when they aren't taken "seriously." Sorry, they can't have it both ways--demanding to be heard, then saying, "gee, we're just poor little understaffed, unprofessional bloggers" when they screw up. You want to be heard, you want to be responsible, and not full of excuses.

Has anyone found "Lucy Ramirez" yet?

If you read the article, it's obvious the writer is a left-wing apologist who doesn't appreciate the significance of Rather's horrendous error, the lack of fact-checking (and the choice to ignore warnings of fraud), and the right-on-the money criticisms made by bloggers. 'nuff said, thinly-veiled is right.

If you left it up to this guy, we'd be reading factual stories about how Bush buggers arab oil tycoons.

Nobody's disputing that there were some irregularties in Bush's guard sevice records, that's not the issue here (and frankly not a huge issue anyway when you consider that Clinton and others avoided service entirely and it didn't affect their careers).

What is an issue is that the memos were obvious forgeries that were never typed. This true-believing moron is post facto making a case that the memos might have real and contained genuine content, and stupid bloggers somehow jumped to conclusions. This guy's criticism of bloggers is that they didn't have fact checkers and used their BRAINS to figure out they were forgeries. In fact, he has no valid criticism of bloggers. It's all about how CBS fell flat on its face.

get this straight, the issue isn't Bush's guard service, but the need of liberal outlets to discover and rescuscitate "facts" to support their point of view. Rush Limbaugh does the same thing, i don't listen to him on the radio.

xenophon10k

"The facts of the story were right, the supporting documents were fake."

That makes no sense. So the facts were right, but the evidence supporting those facts were fake????? What facts are you referring to?

Mr. Clarence Butterworth

"Yeah, paid perjurers on the gravy train with serial liar John O'Neil."

Paid perjurers? I believe that Kerry was more of a perjurer than O'Neil.

The rich royal bloods get the breaks and the masses get the shaft. You are brainwashed if you don't get it.

[Copy of a letter to the editor]

I am a writer and graphic designer whose work has appeared over the years in Playboy, Best American Short Stories and many other publications. I occasionally contribute book reviews to the San Francisco Chronicle, and administer newsroom-l, an email discussion list for journalists.

In "Blog-Gate" Corey Pein writes, "We don't know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof."

I am a Yellow Dog Democrat and I reluctantly called the memos fake on Sept. 13, after a very through analysis of all the evidence. I'm uniquely qualified to comment because I am a very experienced typographer as well as a journalist. I am familiar with all the equipment that was mentioned as the possible source of the memos, and I actually worked on the chief suspect, the IBM Selectric Composer.

I assisted Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, one of the world's leading typography experts, in his analysis of the memos for the Washington Post. For a variety of reasons, he concluded that the memos could not have been created on any equipment in existence at the time they are said to have been produced. After considerable online argument with him, I at last had to agree fully because there was no way to challenge his reasoning, no matter how hard I tried.

Pein says, "In order to understand 'Memogate,' you need to understand 'Haileygate.' David Hailey, a Ph.D. who teaches tech writing at Utah State University not a professional document examiner, but a former Army illustrator studied the CBS memos. His typographic analysis found that, contrary to widespread assumptions, the document may have been typed. (He points out, meanwhile, that because the documents are typed does not necessarily mean they are genuine.) Someone found a draft of his work on a publicly accessible university Web site, and it wound up on a conservative blog, Wizbang. The blog, citing 'evidence' that it had misinterpreted, called Hailey a 'liar, fraud, and charlatan.' Soon Haileys e-mail box was flooded. Anonymous callers demanded his dismissal."

Hailey was just wrong. He made a series of common errors in examining the documents, principally insisting that variations in the vertical displacement of the characters were due to a mechanical device such as a typewriter, when they are almost certainly the result of having been faxed.

There is no way that the documents could have been typed because the shape of a key character identifier for Times -- the number 5 -- is not found on any typewriter that would have been available in 1972-73 except the IBM Selectric Composer, which Phinney proved to my complete satisfaction could not have been used.

I hate to call anyone duplicitous, but it is significant that none of the text that Hailey used to make his case included the number 5 -- even though it appeared in some of the memos.

I went to great lengths to prove that the memos could have been authentic. You can see my reasoning at Font Wars. Scroll down to the bottom and work your way back up. As I was finished with the case by the time Hailey's argument appeared, I only posted an answer on dailykos.com (scroll down). I said, in part:

"He has two basic points:

"[1] The vertical displacement proves that the memos were created on an impact device.

"It doesn't prove anything because these are faxed copies. As I went to some trouble to explain, fax machines produce vertical displacement because of the irregular motion of the rollers and the very low resolution. You can't reproduce this effect on a copying device.

"[2] The face looks like a typewriter face.

"To him. Show me a typewriter face with a 5 like that, and then get its line endings to match several lines of the memos. After a certain number of copies all type faces tend to become similar. They will fall into either serifed or non-serifed, or italic.

"You can only make comparisons based on characters that are distinctive to the face and not subject to distortion by degradation. The Times 5 satisfies those conditions perfectly."

It was very painful for me to have to admit that the memos were forged. I'm sorry to say that Corey Pein does not seem to have a handle on the technical issues involved, and does not seem to have done any serious research to correct his ignorance.

Even if any of the issues themselves were relevant it all became a non issue after November. Whatever the hell Bush did or didn't do in Vietnam he'll be president until 2008 and then nevermore.

That felt good, I want to say it again...


Nevermore.

nerfball:

once again, all the ills of the world acrue to g.w.b.

Absolutely goddamn right. And don't forget it.

on fark, saddam was great. bin laden is to be praised. bush, however, is a warmonger.

I want what you're smoking. Now.

People, any university professor will tell you not to trust anything on the internet at face value. It does not undergo peer evaluation and therefore is in no way checked for veracity. The mere idea that anyone would take news from a blog or any other site not affiliated with an established news agency is completly stupifying

Mordant> Actually, Bush will be President until January 20, 2009.

So, George W. Bush is going to be President of the United States of America for:

4 More Years
48 More Months
210 More Weeks
1474 More Days
35376 More Hours
2122560 More Minutes
127353600 More Seconds

moltov
A review of Rathergate concludes everyone involved, bloggers and mainstream media, was an idiot

Should have read '..., were idiots.'

/Your fourth grade english teacher surrenders.


A review of Rathergate concludes everyone involved, bloggers and mainstream media, was an idiot

Would you say "Everyone was there" or "Everyone were there"?

/Your fourth grade english teacher should be shot.

I hate blogs, bloggers, and anything associated with such an moronic word chosen to represent a moronic way of passing one's time.

Stupid internet fads need to go the fark away.

I've read a few of these blogs and they're just uninteresting "Dear Diary" crap half the time. The only reason they became popular is due to the human voyuristic fascination with other people's meaningless lives.

thunderdome.

Tinian

And Environmental Practice, (Environmental Practice seeks especially to publish studies that link data and findings in science and technology with issues of public policy, health, environmental quality, law, political economy, management...) a thinly veiled enviro-wacko advocay group.

Tinian, yeah, you tell them. Environmental policies are so wacko, even George Bush voices concern for them.

VideoVader

Bush was probably slacking off near the end of his service, but I don't think it was as big a deal as you're depicting. I still don't understand why anyone was ever so fixated on Bush's service in the first place.

Slacking off, eh? Everyone is so fixated on Bush's service because Karen Hughes lied about it in Bush's "auto"biography.

For those of you who were not inclined to click on the link to Power Line above:

Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.

Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:

We dont know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killians secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.
So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake but accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic candidate. Again, Pein says:

Ultimately, we dont know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were apparently bogus (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rathers resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.
Pein concludes with the wistful thought that maybe the mainstream media in general, and CBS in particular, didn't have to take a hit in connection with Memogate:

When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalisms authority was weakened. But it didnt have to be that way.
Pein's thesis is that the bloggers are just as blameworthy as CBS, if not more so:

[O]n close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule... CBSs critics are guilty of many of the very same sins.
Pein thus joins Wonkette as the only commentators who, to my knowledge, have tried to argue that the bloggers' exposure of CBS's fraudulent documents was unfortunate. If the documents were fakes, their position is simply untenable. Recognizing this, Pein tries half-heartedly to show that the documents might have been genuine after all. But this effort is an utter failure:

1) Pein never even mentions the most important evidence that the documents were forgeries, i.e., their substantive errors. The most important such error was the anachronistic effort to portray Brig. Gen. "Buck" Staudt as pressuring Lt. Col. Bobby Hodges to "sugar coat" Lt. Bush's evaluation -- a year and a half after Staudt retired from the Texas Air National Guard. This was the most important of the CBS documents, and based on its content alone, it was an obvious fraud, both fake and inaccurate. Case closed.

2) Pein's discussion of the typographical issues, which were always over-emphasized in the mainstream media, is feeble. He refers to only one of the typographical disputes, the superscript "th," and quotes none other than Bobby Hodges for the proposition that The typewriter can do that little th, sure it can. Hodges, of course, went on to tell the CJR that the documents were obvious forgeries. Of the many other typographical problems, not a word; nor is there any acknowledgement of the fact that, taken altogether, the 2004 fakes did not remotely resemble authentic 1973 documents, as we showed on this site within hours after the controversy erupted on Sept. 9.

3) Pein admits that there were many discrepancies between the forged documents and authentic military practice in National Guard units of the 1970's. Having acknowledged no fewer than 21 such discrepancies, Pein half-heartedly suggests that two of the 21 might (or might not) be in doubt, and draws the inexplicable conclusion that "the press should never accept as gospel the first explanation that comes along." (By "the press," he evidently doesn't mean CBS.)

Beyond that, Pein fails to address obvious problems in the 60 Minutes story. Astonishingly, he tries to shore up Bill Burkett's credibility, quoting someone who described Burkett as "honest and forthright." This might, I suppose, carry some weight with readers who don't know that Burkett never served in the Texas Air National Guard; doesn't know President Bush from Adam; has a longstanding grievance against the Texas National Guard (Army) because of medical benefits he was denied; has suffered a series of what he describes as mental breakdowns, and suffered another mental breakdown while being interviewed by USA Today after the Memogate scandal broke; told a bizarre and obviously false story about the origin of the CBS documents--he got a call from a mystery woman named Lucy Ramirez, who told him to go to the Texas Livestock Show; he went to the show, didn't see Ms. Ramirez, but was approached by a man whom he'd never seen before; the man handed him an envelope and walked away; in the envelope were the National Guard documents; he took them home, made copies, burned the originals--of course, what a natural thing to do--and then presented the copies to CBS.

Pein does acknowledge that Burkett admitted lying to CBS about the origin of the documents, but passes this off as a matter of little consequence. About the broader issue of the apparent coordination between CBS and the Democratic National Committe, Pein is completely silent. If Pein knows that Burkett wrote in an email to fellow Texas Democrats that he gave the fake documents to Max Cleland, acting on behalf of the Kerry campaign, he doesn't let on.

Pein tries to indict the bloggers for possibly having been wrong in a small minority of the questions they raised on September 9. On the other hand, he has not a word of criticism for CBS. Mary Mapes has said that she pursued the National Guard story for five years. Yet CBS never checked into any of the issues that were raised by the bloggers; never questioned Burkett's credibility; and never contacted any of the living people who could have given the lie to the fake documents, like General Staudt. In an interview shortly after Rathergate broke, former CBS Vice-president Jonathan Klein explained that CBS had deliberately decided not to interview Staudt and others because they were believed to be Republicans, and CBS wanted its story to be objective. That's CBS's idea of objectivity--interview Democrats only--and apparently it's the Columbia Journalism Review's standard, too.

Pein tries to argue that the mainstream media talked to various friends and associates of President Bush after the CBS scandal broke, and identified them as such, but somehow did not sufficiently portray them as "right wing," etc. For example:

Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few as Bushs old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described heavy of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, There isnt anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.
Wow, there's a failing. Only describing Allbaugh as President Bush's former chief of staff wasn't enough to alert the audience to the fact that he was a dreaded Republican, whose knowledge should be disregarded.

On the other hand, Pein is remarkably sympathetic to the views of Bill Burkett, which, by any normal definition, are far out of the mainstream, compared to any of the "right wingers" whose information, Pein implies, should have been banned from media coverage of the scandal:

[M]any suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for Bill Burkett in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the loony left, based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and Adolf, and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harpers or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign.
I could go on, but there is little point in doing so. CBS ostensibly "worked" on the National Guard story for years. They took fake documents from a notoriously unstable source who had no first-hand knowledge of President Bush's National Guard career, and who could not account for where he got them. On their face, the documents looked nothing like authentic National Guard memos of the 1970s that were in CBS's possession, but CBS asked no questions. CBS carried out no investigation to determine whether the memos were genuine, and made a point of not talking to people who were ostensibly quoted in the memos to determine whether the documents were accurate. They put the documents before the American public in the heat of an election campaign, and closely coordinated their story with a Democratic National Committee advertising campaign which dovetailed perfectly with the fake documents, and which began the morning after their broadcast. When questioned about the documents' apparent fraudulence, they stonewalled, and Dan Rather guaranteed the American people that the documents were authentic, because they came from an unimpeachable source.

The bloggers, on the other hand, began questioning the documents within hours after they appeared; raised many logical questions about their authenticity, the vast majority of which turned out to be valid; pointed out anachronisms within the documents that proved that their contents were false; and were ultimately proved correct in their suspicion that the documents were fakes. Nearly all of which occurred, not over a period of years, which CBS had to pursue its "story," but over the space of twelve hours.

And the Columbia Journalism Review thinks it is the bloggers who are blameworthy in this story. Sad. Very sad. But I guess we know whose side the "journalists" are on.

MensRea

Way to overlook Marian Carr Knox there, big Texas attorney guy.

Oh wait, I just remembered, Bush didn't do his service during Vietnam. This has never been denied. This was considered common sense nation-wide since 1999.

Suddenly there is a memo of questionable origin and everything changes? What the fark?

pontechango
Slacking off, eh? Everyone is so fixated on Bush's service because Karen Hughes lied about it in Bush's "auto"biography.

I remember seeing that same bit repeated on Bush's bio on the state department website. It was pointed out early last year, and was summarily corrected. If this were really the only reason to get fixated on his record, you wouldn't be paying attention any more because the aforementioned correction is on the public record. The only other thing I think can be done about this would be to recall all the books with that line in it, but that would be ridiculously unnecessary, especially since the book's been out for so long.

VideoVader

It shouldn't have been written in the first place.

FreeRepublic is a hate site; their founder has shown up at Klan rallies.

eraser8: Were the documents produced using Word and alleged to be the source of the CBS documents made using the original Word program and printed on a 1980s era printer? If not, your point here -- and, indeed, your entire exposition -- is irrelevant.

Ooooh, a swing and a miss!

No, it's the other way around. The fact that the document looks exactly as if it were produced using modern software running on a modern OS and printed on a modern printer using modern fonts, and does not look like it was produced on any reasonable office equipment available in 1973 (or even 1983), proves that the document is fake.

The only conceivable way that it could have been done in 1973 is with either cast-metal typesetting equipment or a complex and expensive device called a VariTyper (I used to use one of those, so I know whereof I speak), neither of which would be used for a friggin' memo! That would be like using an SR-71 Blackbird or the Apollo moon launch equipment to travel to the 7-11 less than a block away.

Okay, look. This text here is either in Courier or Courier New, depending on your computer. This is what the type produced by most typewriters of the day looked like (well, except for the low resolution of the screen compared to paper). Courier was the most popular typeface of the IBM Selectrics (the "ball" typewriters, with the letters on a ball instead of on hammers, which thus allowed the font to be changed by simply replacing the ball [these were later replaced by daisy wheels]). Others included Prestige Elite, a smaller font with smaller serifs. I can't show you that one because I don't know which, if any, font on your system would look even close to it.

But both Courier and Prestige Elite are monospaced fonts. Notice how the letters in these paragraphs line up exactly with the letters in the lines above them? That's because every letter takes up the same amount of horizontal space. An "i" or "l" or "!" or even "." takes up just as much space horizontally as an "M" or "W." Notice how, to make this look reasonably good and without having gaps in the text, that the serifs on the "I" and the bottom serifs of the "i" and "l" are HUGE compared to, say, the serifs on the strokes of the "n." Notice also how the "humps" of the "m" are very squeezed compared to the "n" (indeed, the font designer didn't even have room to put the bottom serif on the rightmost stroke of the "m"!).

Typewriters did monospacing because it was vastly easier and cheaper to build them to do so. The spacing could be handled by a simple ratchet system with preset 10 or 12 teeth per inch (some typewriters, such as ball or daisy wheel and thus interchangable fonts, had both sets of ratchets and could be switched between them). Typewriters basically did Elite or Pica sizing / spacing (Courier was a Pica-sized font), meaning 12 or 10 characters per inch, respectively. Elite had more characters per inch, so each character was smaller. Pica was preferred for easy readability, and Elite was preferred for packing more text per page.

For comparison, this text is in either Times or Times New Roman, depending on your computer. Notice how the characters do not line up one under another. A character in a given line may wind up between two characters in the line just above or below it. This is because letters can be of different widths. The "i" and "l" and "!" and "." are considerably narrower than the "M" or "W." So, no tricks such as huge serifs or squeezed humps on the "m" are needed to make the letters look good in the same width, since they don't take up the same width. Each character can be as wide or as narrow as it needs to be.

The only typewriter of the time that could do proportional spacing at all was the IBM Executive. This was a very expensive typewriter that required special skills from the typist. For instance, instead of having a single space bar, it had two (as if the usual one space bar were split): one with the number "2" on it, and one with the number "3", representing how many units of spacing each space bar gave. The typist would need to calculate which ones to hit and when to give the required amount of spacing to cause the right margin to line up if fully-justified text was desired. Such a typewriter would be used for doing up very nicely-formatted flyers, etc. in the days before desktop publishing and laser printers. It would not be used to type up inter-office memoes.

Furthermore, the Executive didn't use a ball or a daisy wheel, but hammers, which means that it had only the one font which could not be changed by any means whatsoever, and it wasn't Times New Roman. It was more like Palatino (chiseled serifs), but not quite. Depending on your system, this paragraph and the immediately preceeding one (talking about the IBM Executive) may appear in Palatino or a similar font. Even though both are proportionally-spaced and specify the same point size, notice that this text has a quite different spacing and overall "look" from the Times New Roman (or Times) font two paragraphs up.

There's also the matter of characters. People focus on the "^th" but that's not the only example. Typewriters, whether ball or daisywheel or the old hammer type, can only type characters that physically exist in the mechanics of the typewriter or on the ball or wheel. For instance, they have straight quotes for apostrophes (') and quotation marks ("), but typesetting and desktop publishing makes available the fancier curved quotes that have separate opening and closing versions (' ' " "). Notice that I use those in most of my posts, and throughout this post except in the Courier paragraphs. Had I used those characters there, then it would've been a dead giveaway that it wasn't typed. Courier does have such characters on personal computers but not on typewriters at the time (for similar reasons, when talking about the huge serifs on certain letters, I used UPPER-CASE for emphasis on the word "HUGE" instead of italics since, while italics [or, technically, oblique] does exist for Courier on computers, it did not exist for most typewriters of the time)! Now look at the "original" memo and you will see definite use of the Right / Closing Single Quote (') instead of the Straight Single Quote (') as the apostrophe, several times.

So, you see, the problem is that the memo is claimed to have been typed in 1973, and yet has features that did not exist in 1973 (or were prohibitively expensive and difficult to use even for the military).

To put it in perspective, imagine if I claimed to have found a previously-unknown "lost episode" of, oh, say, I Love Lucy. I want you to pay me a million dollars for it, and since you are an avid collector of genuine Lucy artifacts, you agree, but only if it's a genuine lost episode.

You are all ready to call on an expert to analyze it, but there's no need, because one glance at it is enough to tell you that it's astronomically unlikely to be genuine. For one thing, it's in full color. For another, it's in HDTV. For another, the actors bear no resemblence at all to Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, etc., and wear clothes that are in fashion now, not the 1950s. Also, there are special effects that are obviously CGI. The piano in the Ricardo's living room set is replaced by a Yamaha Clavinova CVP-309PE with color LCD display panel, and there is a PowerMac G5 on the coffee table with an Apple Cinema HD 30" display.

The odds of an episode like that actually being a genuine 1950s I Love Lucy episode are about equal to the odds of that memo being genuine, and for similar reasons.

Hey, I wish it were genuine! I hate Bush, and honestly wanted him to lose! I fear that his Presidency is going to accelerate the end of civilization by generations.

But, it wasn't genuine, and CBS News and Dan Ra^ther should've known that.

Ever see Rumiko Takahashi's Inu-Yasha on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block? Those who watch it know that Inu-Yasha's ultimate attack with his powerful sword Tetsusaiga is called the "Backlash Wave," which takes his enemy's demonic energy attack, merges it with the sword's own energies, and sends it back to the enemy as a swarm of energy tornadoes. But, he can only use it if the enemy attacks him with a demonic energy attack. If the enemy does not, then he must resort to lesser attacks instead.

This memo and CBS News's incompetence concerning it, Michael Moore's F°9/11 and the stretching of the truth that was revealed about it, etc. gave Rove the opportunity to use a similar devastating backlash effect against Bush's foes in the campaign. It made the public think, "If they have to make up bad stuff about Bush, he must not be all that bad! And if those things are made up, the other bad stuff we hear about him probably is, too!" Had those not happened, Bush probably would've lost!

The very memo that was supposed to derail his campaign actually helped insure his victory!

bloggers are shiatstains

That's great, LawrencePerson. You got any more right wing garbage to post that ignores Marian Carr Knox?

pontechango
It shouldn't have been written in the first place.

Yes, and it's since been corrected, so if that were the only issue regarding Bush's guard service, there'd be no reason to continue debating it. However, you do, and you've still yet to tell me why you're still fixated with Bush's guard service with regards to his job as president.

VideoVader

Bush "likes somebody he sees as having overcome potential disadvantages, because he sees himself as having done that," says Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine and a close follower of the president.

Cry me a f*cking river, VideoVader. Bush comes from a rich power dynasty. He did not earn the presidency through individual merit. He gamed it through Saudi money and powerful political connections. Bush is symptomatic of everything that is wrong with the United States. Even Iyad Allawi refers to Iraq as a "catastrophe" these days.

I'm fixated on the INJUSTICE.

VideoVader

Yes, and it's since been corrected

Including the current versions of "A Charge to Keep"? I doubt it.

Late, and trolls are trolls...but I would like answers even if I won't get any...cowards.

1. If you worked for a news agency, got this memo, took it to an "expert" who said it was legit, what would you do with it? And before you answer, remember that your old posts are archived and we can find out what BS you've posted in the past.

2. Do you think Bush recieved preferential treatment to get into the Texas Air National Guard. If not, how do you explain his relatively low test scores on the Pilot's exam?

3. Do you think Bush served his full term in the Texas Air National Guard? If so, what do you believe to be the cause of the holes in his documentation record, and his failure to complete required exams.

4. Do you believe Bush joined the Air National Guard to avoid serving in Combat in Vietnam? If not, do you believe Clinton purposefully avoided service in Vietnam?

5. Is John Kerry's performance in vietnam more or less honorable than George Bush's performance in the Air National Guard.

/not expecting responses to actual, logical questions from trolls on here.

Probably a simpler way to look at it from both sides is this... If someone tells you exactly what you want to hear then it can't be a lie and listening to anything further is just a waste of time. Likewise, passing on information discovered this way to others who also want to hear it is perfectly honest and acceptable.

HAH!

The libtard media was exposed and the people that outted them is being called an idiot. Looks like the libtards would rather be lied to. Then again, they have always been afraid of the facts.

And it was great how the idiot libbys here tried to change the subject.



I swear....if a libby ever exposed themselves to the facts they'd become a republican


instead they like to live in their own little bubble world and attack religion.


OH! I see it's time to cry for yet ANOTHER recount in Iowa


these morons love to wallow in denile

bunnymud
You. Can't. Be. Serious.

Please tell me that post of yours was a joke.

For the love of god restore some semblance of my faith in basic human dignity and intelligence and tell me you were joking.

Please.