Rather To Defend Himself Tonight
POWERLINE
CBS has announced that Dan Rather will address the controversy surrounding the forged National Guard documents on the evening news tonight. CBS' press release jumps the gun on one point, breathlessly announcing the existence of a typewriter that can do superscript:
At this time, however, CBS News states with absolute certainty that the ability to produce the "th" superscript mentioned in reports about the documents did exist on typewriters as early as 1968, and in fact is in President Bush's official military records released by the White House.
The superscript issue is, as we've said, relatively minor, and the superscript that is found in one of the documents in Bush's records is completely different from the one in the forged documents.
This is what I expected from CBS, however: pick out one or two relatively small points and show that a typewriter that satisfied those criteria existed in 1972. Which doesn't prove, of course, that Jerry Killian had one--his family says he never typed at all--and doesn't address any of the substantive issues surrounding the memos.
Posted by Hindrocket at 04:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (1)
Caddell Warns His Party
Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell told Fox News today that if CBS's National Guard documents are forged, "the race is over":
Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell said Friday that if documents aired by CBS newsman Dan Rather Wednesday night turn out to be forged, as alleged by experts, the presidential race "is over."
"It would be the end of the race," Caddell told Fox News Live. "It would be the end of the race," he repeated.
"[Democratic officials are] so involved in this," the former Carter pollster worried. "They have gotten themselves so involved in this issue [in] the last 24 hours that somebody's going to, if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this." Caddell said..."I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."
He said that forfeiting the presidential race would be the least of his party's problems if Democrats are tied to any forgery scandal.
"The race is over – and we've got bigger problems than that," he warned.
Posted by Hindrocket at 03:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBack (7)
The Daily Kos Strikes Out
The Daily Kos has tried to rebut our deconstruction of the 60 Minutes forgeries. Naturally, Kos addresses only the least significant points, while never mentioning the most damning features of the memos.
Kos' entire effort is devoted to showing that there was a typewriter in existence in the early 1970's that was capable of producing proportional spacing, superscript and Times New Roman font. There is no evidence, of course, that Jerry Killian used such an exotic machine, and certainly no other authentic documents generated by the Texas Air National Guard used such a machine.
But these are minor points. Kos never addresses the smoking-gun issue of kerning. We discussed this extensively yesterday, but briefly, "kerning" is the ability of letters in word-processed documents to intrude on one another's space. If you type the word "my" in Word or any other word processing program, the tail of the "y" will curl slightly under the "m." This cannot be done on any typewriter, because a typewriter cannot know what the adjacent letter is. A letter on a typewriter must have its own space.
Look at the fake August 18, 2003 memo (click to enlage):
Check out the word "my" in line two, or "any" in line four. That's kerning. It was done on a word processor. As, in fact, should be apparent to anyone who looks at the document. Compare it to a genuine, typewriter-produced memo, as we did yesterday. The difference is obvious.
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.
The fact is that the issue of the documents' genuineness is not a close call. In appearance, in tone, and in content, they are inauthentic. Only in the context of the left's hysteria over John Kerry's sinking ship could such obvious fakes be given credence by anyone.
UPDATE: A number of readers have written to disagree with my take on the kerning issue. Kerning apparently is not the default option in Word, and some have said that the documents do not appear to be kerned. I would defer to others on the technical issues here, but my point is a pretty simple one and rests on visual observation. To me, it appears that in several instances, as noted above, letters invade one another's space. This cannot be done on a typewriter, so whether it is "kerning" or just a feature of the word processing program and the font used is really immaterial. Typewriters can't do this. A couple of readers have disagreed with my visual observation, and don't think there is any such obervation; one suggested the possibility of "distortion" caused by photocopying. You can view the documents and judge for yourselves.
But I don't want to lose sight of the more basic point, which is that the documents simply look like word processed documents, not typed documents. |
