People have stated that these were commonly sold. Why do you assume that the TANG wouldn’t have had some of these. Did they not have secretaries? In anycase, I recall my father having one of these and he likely got it when he was a school principal in the early 1970s. Why are you so certain Killian, or his typists, only had more basic typewriters?
Pray tell dangermouse1956, please list these “so many other things” for us. I may have missed some in the noise, but I’ve yet to see a nail in the document’s coffin.
Here’s what I’ve seen:
•Dan Rather and his experts stand by the documents authenticity.
•When asked directly about the documents and their contents, the white house refuses to comment in any substantive fashion.
•A bunch of people, many of whom have obviously never used a typewriter, or have the least idea of their onetime capabilities, produce gif animations of low resolution scans and claim to hold the keys to the kingdom of truth.
Applying the well known maxim that close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades, Occam sticks with the memo’s being authentic until something else comes into the picture to nail things down, one way or another.
I hate to speak in this man’s defense, and I’ll sure be pleased if the memos turn out to be real, but be fair. Why the hell would Bush have any idea if they’re genuine?
Hmm. Thinking about this topic makes me wonder whether -any- original memos from the same office at about the same time exist. A comparison of typeface, style, and signature would not be conclusive, but would lend a great deal of weight to one argument or another.
Don’t you think the president might have a pretty good idea of whether the memos give an accurate description of the events surrounding his loss of flight status?
If he knows the account given by the memos is false, then it’s pretty certain that the documents are faked.
If he knows that the account given by the memos is true, then there’s a pretty good chance that the memos are genuine. They might still be faked, but what are the chances of a forger coming up with the straight dope on Bush’s service by accident?
From here.
Bush’s AF Reserve Personnel Record Card showing 56 total points for 12-month period ending May 26, 1973. Look under “GRADE”. You’ll notice that it says “1st LT”.
Dental examination record showing Bush was at Alabama air base. Look at the bottom, in the section on patient data, under “GRAD, RATING, OR POSITON” it says “1ST LT”.
From here.
Career Points Summary (Form 712) About halfway down there’s a large signature. To the right of that it says "ROGER W. BIVENS, 1st Lt.
“Not Observed” Officer Effectiveness Training Report Upper right corner of the document. It says… take a guess… drumroll please… “1st Lt”
That’s four examples of “1st Lt” that I found in the first 6 or 8 documents that I checked at random.
Or, they could be totally off, but he may be taking the high road and ignoring it, confident that the truth will out.
Or, they could be partially true forgeries, and he doesn’t want to deny everything because evidence of some of it could come to light, making him look somewhat more foolish than usual.
Or, something I haven’t thought of. It’s a big world and a lot of things happen.
Aside from that, my suggestion was that Bush probably wouldn’t know about the authenticity of the memos. I doubt those exerting pressure in Junior’s name would mention it. They’d have been trying to earn brownie points with his dad. And Bush Sr. wouldn’t necessarily mention it to him, if he was even aware of it. His C.O. certainly wouldn’t. He would not have had access to the memos themselves.
I honestly don’t think he has any better way than the rest of us of knowing -for sure-. He might have an inkling or two, but I doubt anything was made explicit if it occured.
In my experience this is not true. I worked in a book publishing company for a few years, doing desktop publishing among other things. One of the things I had to do was update the books when we received new versions of the DTP software. Early on, we used Ventura Publisher. Then it became Corel Ventura. Then later we moved to another DTP package entirely.
The worst part of upgrading was having to reformat the books because of subtle changes in font spacing, margin widths, etc. Times New Roman 11pt in Word would not space out the same as TNR 11pt in Ventura. It would even differ between versions of the software. Sometimes the difference wasn’t font spacing, but margin spacing or a slight change in the borders around images.
Part of the reason I instantly thought ‘forgery’ when I saw Word overlaid on the original and the spacing coming out pretty much exact was because I have spent far too many hours trying to identically match text like that.
So you’re saying that in the 1980’s the characterics of the font were changed, and yet the new font matches the older typed one?
Other pieces of evidence I’ve offered have gone uncommented. I posted a link to a site where someone took an IBM Selectric Composer (the only machine in existence at the time that could conceivably have typed that), and tried to duplicate the memo. The spacing wasn’t even close. The line spacing was much closer, and some of the lines ended 30% closer than their opposites. Big, big differences. Well outside the margin of degredation error. The composer was also the price of a car, and required extensive training to use. To suppose that there would be one sitting in a Guard office, being used to bang out memos ‘For File’ with typographic precision, just doesn’t make sense on its face.
From the Washington Post:
Naturally. Because defence budgets are always tight, and the military never squanders away money unnecessarily. 
It is true that the various Times fonts, that are all to be imitations of the first one, are slightly different. It would be interesting to see how the letters match up first and the spacing issue second. Why? Well, we don’t know how the document on CBS website has been treated. Faxed, copied, scanned, etc. It’s clear the documents have some distortion in them. Second, you need to read that site more carefully, the line up isn’t as bad as you make it sound. Some of the problem is due to the “th”. Third, the Selectric is not the only one that could have done this (I’m told, this is what indicates forgery the most: the th thing). Fourth, lots of small places had this typewriter then and the idea it wasn’t used for this kind of memo vs that kind of memo is silly.
Apparently we’ll have to see what the sleuths at USA Today have to say about the copies they now have. :rolleyes: :dubious: :eek:
I really don’t understand why some of you are so willing to dismiss experts, and split hairs about what might have been possible in 1973.
The evidence from numerous experts shows that these documents are forgeries. And CBS’s experts aren’t credible. From the same Washington Post article linked above:
The only question left is whether CBS News will continue to protect the source that damaged them so.
Read again: “…and didn’t care about these subtle distinctions, many of which were invisible at 10 pt at 300 dpi…”
I don’t understand how your reference indicates that those two experts aren’t credible. Marcel Matley said that he can’t authenticate them because they are copies far removed from the originals. Maybe that’s the plain truth. If so, saying it doesn’t discredit him. And Bill Glennon simply said that typewriters that could produce superscripts and proportional spacing existed in 1972. He didn’t claim that he could authenticate them nor did he claim to be a document expert. Are you claiming that these are the only people CBS consulted? If so, do you have a source for that?
Which numerous experts are you citing to show that they are forgeries? The ones that claimed that superscripts and proportional fonts weren’t possible on typewriters at that time? I think they’re the ones that have been discredited. And what is or isn’t “the only question” is simply a matter of your opinion.
I don’t know if these things are forgeries or not. Even if they were done on typewriters they could still be forgeries that were typed up recently, typewriters and ribbons are still relatively easy to obtain. And even if it can be proven that the couldn’t have been made on typewriters, that may simply indicate that old documents were archived by converting to digital format by scanning and then ocr’ing while retaining the signatures.
We simply don’t know. CBS seems to have other reasons to believe what they’re saying. Could they simply be bluffing at this point to maintain their image? Sure, anythings possible, but it seems unlikely IMHO. Hopefully time will tell.
Sold to whom? Secretaries in general? Military secretaries? Typesetting secretaries?
Because Rather won’t provide the “originals” for us to examine, and he won’t name the expert(s) who verified them. In fact he hasn’t provided a bit of substantive evidence for us to go on.
Because (as has been already stated) the White House doesn’t know anything one way or another.
Because the chances of being able to reproduce memos from 32 years ago with such uncanny accuracy, without having to “play with” Word’s settings at all, is next to nil. They didn’t get close, they got exactly what they attempted to get.
No one is claiming to hold the keys to the kingdom of truth. That was just plain sarcastic. And you don’t know how old these people are, do you? Or whether they’ve researched and used typewriters, do you?
Now as for the rest of it–today is a school day for me, and I have a test tomorrow, and this is a heck of a big job gathering all the rest of the evidence, but answer I shall, eventually.
How exactly is he supposed to provide us with the “originals”? Is he going to let you and I into his office to examine them personally? All we can ever possibly see are scanned images or possibly digitized photographs. In fact, these documents may only exist in digital archives. The anonymity of the experts is a good point. Maybe they’re afraid of personal publicity in the currently contentious political atmosphere, but that does seem to be a reach.
But, I would think that they would know whether the allegations are true or not. If they’re not, then they could have safely denounced the documents. So why didn’t they?
“Exactly” is a pretty strong word here. I assume you’re referring to the documents here. When I compare those two documents side by side I can spot numerous differences. The uneven baseline in the CBS document isn’t duplicated in the Word document. The 8’s have been mentioned before, they’re different. In the CBS document, the superscript “th” clearly extends above the other characters, in the Word document, it does not. The lower case “a” appears different to me. In the Word document the “circle” part looks smaller and the top loop seems to slant down at a greater angle. I suppose that it could be argued that these “a” differences are due to image degradation, but they’re consistent throughout the document so that seems unlikely. The overlay really doesn’t prove anything. The differences are minor enough that they simply cancel out when overlayed. (When I say their minor, I mean physically minor. The effect they have on LGF’s argument is more than minor, IMHO.)
I just now read about how the “th” vertical spacing difference goes away when the Word document is printed. If that’s true then I retract that part of my last statement.
In many bureaucracies, the executives always get the best office gear, even though they don’t need the bells and whistles. The underlings get by with last year’s model.
This is one of the most fascinating and informative threads I’ve ever seen at Straight Dope. I hate to sully it with a queston that is most likely stupid, but can’t these things be carbon dated or something? I mean, I see people argue all the time about whether the book of Mark was written in 50 AD or 70 AD, citing carbon dating to support their claims. Can’t we tell whether these memos were typed 30+ years ago or not?