Anyone have an empirical interest in the "forgery" flap?

[troublemaker]

I don't think anyone should spend one second worrying about the authenticity of the CBS docs if they don't want to, but that doesn't mean there are no problems. The theory that these were done in MS Word should have been completely debunked in an hour, yet it hasn't really been debunked at all. Either everyone in the world is too dumb to know how problems are solved or else this is not quite as easy to debunk as it should be. That concerns me. (And CBS didn't do much to ease my mind. Who the hell hires a handwriting expert to look at xeroxes? You know how you do a signature on a xerox forgery? You xerox the signature from another document. Duh! So it's interesting if a signature is wrong, but meaningless if it's right.)

When a freeper moran offers a dumb "proof" of forgery it's easy to shoot down, but debunking moronic arguments is a comment on the arguments, not on the documents. Documents speak for themselves. Debunking the Freeps is a de facto straw man argument... they are dumb enough to provide the straw men so we don't have to, but it works out the same.

By questioning authenticity the repubs have created a situation wherein the docs are presumptively damning if real, so as a political matter much of Bush's character issue now rests on the authenticity question. (That's not rational, but it's the political reality.) And for once it potentially makes a difference what we find here, since the internet is waht's driving this story on both sides.

I'll start...

Are IBM super-script "th"s underlined? If so, why aren't these?:
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay18.pdf

(On the other side, here's a question for freeps: why are the "th"s in the docs raised 2.5 points above the MS Word default settings?)

[the Kelly Gang]

1. look no matter what happens the freepers wont believe it

they need anything no matter how rediculous to believe what they want to.

I knew these had to be real for the very simple reason that CBS would have checked the accuracy to the nth degree..and there must have been hundreds/thousands of other documents in the army files written in similar style.

But CBS will be milking this for all it's worth

[troublemaker]

5. I don't want to convince freepers

But I do want to know the truth for myself. (It would make it easier for me to talk to people in the real world about AWOL issues)

I wish I shared your confidence in CBS, but I've seen some really dumb stuff make it onto TV and I'm still shocked Rather didn't provide an example of the machine used. I thought that would have been a piece of cake.

[zoeb]

6. I hope they milk...

it until we are as tired of hearing about that as we were of the SBV.

[The Traveler]

2. Not sure but I think

it all depended upon which "font ball" you had installed ... and there were many, many different kinds of those. My sister had a Selectric and about dozen different font balls for Spanish and English. So I think the answer is you're asking the wrong question. The right question is: was there a font ball that displayed all the characteristics shown in the document, including its presentation of superscripting?

[troublemaker]

3. Yes, that is THE question, but nobody has stepped up with such a

machine. That's what I mean by should have been debunked in an hour. I expected someone to have an identical typed doccument done by last night. So that makes me wonder whether the machine is more exotic than I had assumed.

[zoeb]

8. I bet CBS has such a machine...or an expert with one! n/t

[zoeb]

4. my two cents...

Whitehouse didn't scream and kick about how they had to be a forgery. What they did say is that it was "yellow journalism" and that it was "politicaly motivated" and that we should stay on the "issues". Sounds to me like they knew the damn things were real!

[blurp]

7. Probably forged, BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER

Two things:

#1 Loading up MS Word, not changing the defaults, and just typing the 18 August 1973 memo gives you something nearly identical to the document said to be typed in 1973. Printing it out raises the "th" higher than what is on the screen and gives what looks like a perfect match.

#2 BIG FKING DEAL. A forged document that says "Hitler is an evil bastard" just tells us what we already know. Same situation here.

I think someone got a little over-zealous trying to nail Bush. SO WHAT. It's plainly obvious that the senator's son from Texas was given a free ride while certain other people were earning three purple hearts.

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

9. based on what I know about Air Force correspondence....

...and stuff like CYA memos, I do have some questions about these.

I dont know the details about typewriters, but I did see some old IBMs around the office., so the Air Force did have them. Most of the older Air Force correspodence that I ran across on my job wasnt in Times. Not saying that this font wasnt available, just saying I never saw in typed corresponence till MS Office was adopted.

My questioning of the memos is more format and content related.