Now comes information that the putative typewriter expert or computer expert who attacked the National Guard memos shown by CBS is not a font or typewriting specialist, but just an activist GOP lawyer in a Bush-connected
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for printing this information. High time somebody did.
I didn’t pay much attention to the initial GOP accusation of “forgeries.” It was the typical knee-jerk attack, and rather lame at that. Then the Washington Post gave the ridiculous allegations an artificial respectability and prominence on its front page, as a “controversy” over the memos. Journalistic envy, competitiveness and insecurity may be in the picture here; CBS acquired documents that the Post’s investigative aces should have acquired, preferably before 2000, when George Dubya Bush was supposedly being vetted as a candidate (for PRESIDENT?!?).
CBS, to its credit, posted the four memos on its web site:
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay19.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust1.pdf
www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardaugust18.pdf
Belatedly scrutinizing the memos themselves, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I personally have written and typed since high school, though not often for newspapers before 1996; I have typed thousands of pages for myself and other people; I used a series of IBM Selectric typewriters, beginning in the 1970s, before switching to the computer. My second-to-last "word processor" had a memory so large, a vertical tower, that I used it as a typewriter stand (it created an –st and –th suffix after numbers, by the way); I still have an IBM Selectric III sitting on the floor of an upstairs room with other storage, which I use occasionally for addressing envelopes. I don’t like using it, because its lines are wavering and its font spacing is uneven, as in the memos. There is no realistic possibility that these memos are computer-generated.
Let me repeat that. THERE IS NO REALISTIC POSSIBILITY THAT THESE MEMOS ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED. Their wavering lines, the inconsistent spacing between letters, the stuck-key spacing between some words all indicate a typewriter keyboard, and I know the feeling.
Furthermore, Lt. Colonel Killian’s longtime secretary appeared on last week’s Sixty Minutes to confirm the content in the memos. (Oh yes, the content – remember that?) She also confirmed the content in an interview with the New York Times. She said she did not type them herself – and indeed they show signs of amateur rather than professional typing (not executive-secretary quality), particularly the three shortest memos. Perhaps those were typed by the late Col. Killian himself, using the one-finger method. It wouldn’t be the only time in history that someone went into his office on a Saturday and typed what his eighty-six-year-old former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, called a “cover-your-behind memo.”
The Bush campaign is toeing a thin line, here. They can count on the fact that only half of households in
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