Conventional Counterattack

Well, you knew it was coming.

After the very successful Republican National Convention, which resulted in a substantial lead for President Bush in several polls (Time, Newsweek, Gallup, Washington Post/ABC News), it was inevitable that the Democrats and mainstream media would counterattack, and they certainly have.

TANG or Kool-Aid?

Once again, President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard has been dredged up by the Democrats and the media, who seem absolutely determined to create a scandal where none exists. It has been rehashed so many times that it isn't even vaguely interesting any more, except as an amusing sideshow. It's become tragi-comic, watching the mainstream media and the Democrats twisting themselves into pretzels over this.

I've come to the realization that the media wants the presidential race to be a close in order to boost numbers of viewers and ratings. In addition, the media wants nothing more than for John Kerry to win. How far will the media go in order to boost ratings and see John Kerry win?

Well, would you believe forgery?

On CBS 60 Minutes II this past Wednesday night (Sept. 8, 2004), they released some "new" documents purporting to show that President Bush disobeyed a direct order to undergo a physical exam to maintain his current flying status and that he had received preferential treatment from superior officers.

Here are PDF copies of the original documents (Adobe Acrobat required). Take a very careful look at them. Note that these are purportedly original documents from 1972 and 1973, the latest being August of 1973.

Do you notice anything unusual about these documents? Examine them closely! Remember that they were supposedly typed on a early-1970's model (at the latest) typewriter.

Your Face Is Killing Me!

Let me be direct and up front here. There are a number of things wrong with these documents, all of which indicate quite strongly - in fact, I'd go so far as to say prove beyond reasonable doubt -  that they are forgeries.

Let's start with the font that they are written in. In printing and typesetting terms, the font (or the "face") is the style of the lettering that the text is printed in. There are literally hundreds of kinds of fonts, but one of the most common is "Times Roman," or as Microsoft calls it "Times New Roman." The Times Roman font is a type of font called a "proportional" font. In proportional fonts, each letter takes up a different amount of horizontal space, so that a "W" is much wider than an "i" (to take the most obvious case).

It's easy to see this if the letters are aligned vertically (note that these examples might not work properly in some browsers or non-Windows computers):

                                 We the people
                                  ie the people

Other fonts (such as Courier) are "monospace" fonts. In monospace fonts, every letter takes up the same amount of horizontal space. Here is the same example from above, but in a monospace font face (Courier New):

            We the people
            ie the people  

Do you see how the letters line up perfectly in the monospace (Courier New) font, but don't in the proportional (Times New Roman) font? That is how all proportional and monospace fonts work, regardless of how they were created. The width of letters in proportional fonts varies; in monospace fonts, all letters are the same width.

Look again at the documents which supposedly were created in 1972 and 1973. They are in a proportional font that looks very much like Times Roman. Having spent a fair amount of time around word processing software, my educated guess is that it is Times Roman. There are similar fonts, like
        Bookman Old Style 12 point, or
        Garamond 12 point, or
        Goudy Old Style 12 point
but none match the font face on those documents nearly as well as Times Roman.

Here is the salient point: No typewriter in common use in 1972 or 1973 could produce any proportional font. At that time, there was some expensive, high-end, specialized equipment that would have been able to do so, but it wasn't common, in all likelihood would not have been used at a Texas Air National Guard base, and certainly wouldn't have been used for straightforward office memos.

This afternoon I did some research and came across The Selectric Typewriter Museum (so did everyone else - the site is temporarily down due to an excessive number of hits). The site shows the fonts available for IBM Selectric typewriters from the 1970's era. None were proportional. Typical office typewriters of that era simply weren't capable of producing proportional fonts.

There's another problem with these documents. They have features (besides the proportional font) that typewriters of the early 1970's couldn't produce, such as kerned, double-letter superscripts:

See what I circled in red above? That's a kerned, double-letter superscript. It looks almost exactly like this following bit of text I typed, doesn't it?

2. Report to 111^th F.L.S. administrative office for schedule of appointment and additional instructions. Examination will be conducted in duty status.

Notice how the "th" after the 111 is raised above the line of the text and is much smaller than the rest of the text. No common 1970's era typewriter can do that.

Why can I produce here on a web page, using Microsoft Times New Roman 12 point font in Microsoft FrontPage, something that looks nearly identical to something that supposedly was typed in 1972? The answer is clearly and obviously because the documents are forgeries. It's pretty clear that they were produced using Microsoft Word by someone that was a complete buffoon when it comes to forgery.

There are lots of other problems with these documents. I don't want to take the time to lay them all out in detail, especially since I'm not adding anything new to the discussion. Others, like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs and John Hindraker, Scott W. Johnson, and Paul Mirengoff of Powerline and the commenters on their sites uncovered all of this. Check them out for the latest on this major, major media scandal and for a lot more information on how bogus these documents are.

Fools or Felons?

The mainstream media, specifically CBS News and MSNBC, have gone completely off the deep end. They are, in theory, the professionals, but they either:

1. Forged documents and lied in the most egregious manner possible, slandering the president horribly. If this is the case, then it seems to me (IANAL) the President would have clear grounds for suing for libel, and there may be cause for a criminal investigation (again, IANAL). This conclusion is supported by the fact that CBS News said they had the documents authenticated by experts and associates of Colonel Killian. Of course, they didn't name the "experts" nor the "associates":

   CBS stood by its reporting. "As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the 60 Minutes report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts," CBS News said in a statement. "As importantly, 60 Minutes also interviewed close associates of Colonel Jerry Killian. They confirm that the documents reflect his opinions and actions at the time."

2. Were completely and utterly duped by someone. If CBS News and the "experts" that "thoroughly examined" the documents are this easily fooled, why are they in the news business at all? The blogosphere had completely demolished the authenticity of these documents within hours of their public release. Is CBS News' fact checking truly that incompetent? Why should we believe anything that the mainstream media says? Their credibility is now essentially zero. Treat everything the media reports as a rumor, at best, until it has been corroborated by more than one eyewitness or other primary, unbiased sources. The media's leftist slant has completely overwhelmed whatever little objectivity they had.

The John Kerry campaign and his mainstream media supporters launched a counterattack, that's for sure. But rather than damaging President Bush, it looks like they just shot themselves in the foot. It's yet another example of the incompetence of John Kerry's campaign. How can anyone take this guy seriously?

Permanent link