Yes, Virginia, they're fake
From the desk of Jane Galt:
So here I am in sunnyfoggy London, having spent a lovely week in Ireland after my grandfather's funeral. I'm sitting in an internet cafe, paying their absolutely outrageous (£2.00/hr) charges for the privilege of catching up on old news. I missed the Russian tragedy, may its perpetrators enjoy eternity in the company of Grtug, the nine-headed fire demon. I missed Bush's amazing bounce (cough). And, of course, I missed the Amazing Memo Caper.
<font size=4>
Well, having spent my two quid brushing up on its intricate details, I confess myself gobsmacked that CBS bought these things. The first thing that I thought when looking at them (and due to poor clicking, I thought I was looking at verified comparison documents, not the memos in question) was <font color=green>"but that couldn't have been made in the 1970's".<font color=black>
But Jane, you will say, you were but a mewling infant when these memos were typed. Indeed so. However, my parents were of the tiresome middle class sort who believe in instilling a strong work ethic in their children by (shudder) making them work. From an unbearably young age. Hence, I have rather more experience with the IBM Selectric than your average girl of my years.
It is simply not possible that such a typewriter was used to produce something that lines up perfectly with a Microsoft Word document. The tab stops were set by moving a lever, for one thing. While it is, I suppose, vaguely conceivable that you might set your tab stops to the same exact ones as Microsoft Word, your tab would slide around a bit, because you never get it *exactly* back to the same place it was before. Anyone who has ever done inset text on a Selectric knows what I'm talking about.
And it is literally Impossible that on three separate memos, the typist managed to perfectly line up centered text exactly the way Microsoft Word would. It's impossible to get it done that well once, much less three times.
Even if our typist were in the throes of an OCD fit hitherto unsurpassed in the history of man, there is absolutely no way you could mill it that precisely, because the paper goes in at a different place every time you load it. Since the tab stops will fall at a slightly different place each time, due to small shifts in the distance of the left edge of the paper from the edge of the typewriter roll, even if the typist were managing, somehow, to line the centered hed up perfectly with the paper, it would then *not* line up perfectly with the text below it -- it would look off center.
The chances of someone, purely by luck, managing to break all the lines they typed in exactly the same place as Microsoft Word's defaults are also pretty slim -- about the same, I'd estimate, as those of my getting up out of my chair, trotting over to Athens, and winning the ladies 400M relay single-handedly this evening.
Etc. Etc. You've read it already, covered by better blogs than mine. But the slam dunk is the 'curly quotes' -- the apostrophes that curl towards the words they surround. There is no key for this on your keyboard, nor was there on any typewriter I've ever worked on. But there's no need to rehash this. The chances that you could produce, by accident, a typewritten document that looks exactly like what comes out of your laser printer when you write the same thing in Microsoft Word, is a hell of a lot smaller than the chance that the earth will be destroyed by an asteroid: i.e. too small to worry about.
What flabbergasts me is how Dan Rather could have been taken in. He's old. He knows what typewritten things look like. These documents don't look like that. It also makes me wonder if 60 minutes is staffing its newsroom with twelve-year-old Pakistani children in order to save money on labour. How else could not one person say <font color=blue>"y'know, this looks an awful lot like the stuff I type on my computer."<font color=black>
{end media-person schadenfreude attack}
And the left-wing blog commenters really need to get over it. Trying to defend these memos is sillier even that the run of the mill, bipartisan <font color=blue>"everything my guys say is true, and I'll kick your butt if you say otherwise, na-na-na-na-I-can't-hear-you"<font color=black> blog ridiculousity. Do not throw your credibility after Dan Rather's. It's okay for not every single horrible accusation against George Bush to be true, just like right-wingers can hate John Kerry just fine even if Larry Thurlow got it wrong.
On a final note, I haven't seen Dan Rather's defense personally, but I've read the transcript, and from what I understand, it's surprisingly bad. Yes, there were machines that could do all of the things that people have pointed out (except curly quotes, which AFAIK, are entirely a word processing phenomenon). But no machine could do them all together, and the procedure outlined for actually doing them is so mind-bogglingly tedious, complicated, and time consuming, that I find it hard to imagine how anyone could seriously entertain the idea that someone did so for a non-official memo.
But leave off the lambasting -- let's talk motives. Because even more staggering than the fact that CBS aired these, is that some drooling incompetent produced them. I mean, how the hell hard would it be to buy a used IBM Selectric and type out some memos?
In fact, it seems to me that the <font color=blue>"Republicans did this to get Kerry"<font color=black> is almost the best explanation here. The memos are sorta-kinda believable, but there are enough faults left in to totally and completely discredit them. What better way to hurt the credibility of everyone hurling charges at Bush, than to let a nice big fat juicy scandal blow up in the faces of those pushing it? Now the next time charges are levelled, some proportion of the population will remember that there are people willing to make up big, stupid lies in order to drag him down.
On the other hand, no one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the general public. Why not give it a try? If it's good enough to fool Dan Rather, maybe it'll go over with the American people too.
This will hurt Kerry a little, more I think, because attack ads will get less cred than because people will blame him. That's not fair. On the other hand, the Democrats who eagerly stepped forward to make political hay out of this can't really complain now that they've been baled.<font size=3>
Posted by Jane Galt at September 11, 2004 |
