Heh. Consider: if the documents are indeed authentic, your freeper pals will have only managed to keep a potentially devastating story to their hero in the news for much longer than it would have been otherwise, as well as appearing to be in serious denial. So which side doesn’t want to talk about it? A lot of the original breathless claims about this or that person knowing everything about typesets and so on have turned out to be laughably wrong. Other more serious questions did indeed create a lot of debate among actual experts, but as the article I noted seems to indicate, even that is shifting.
Of course, with the new stories out today, you’d think that the even more breathless right-wing bloggers would be covering it the same way left-wing bloggers were quick to discuss directly all the supposed evidence of forgery, even going as far as to lean towards that possibility…
nope. Instead, it’s back to accusing the fifth collumn enemy that wants to forget about 9/11… blah blah blah (of course, nevermind us people who were actually THERE, who actually live and love New York instead of hating it and only temporarily becoming groupies so you could exploit us politically and then leave us sick and screwed)
SEPTEMBER 11th we’ll always love you! http://instapundit.com/
Just a little opinion that I’m leaning toward the forgery. I’ve been in printing since 1968. I wracked my brain trying to come up with something I had from an IBM Composer, because I don’t remember the character and word spacing on them being as good as the memo. Then I remembered my high school yearbook. I worked at Taylor Publishing company from 1968 to 1972, one of the two major yearbook companies. I used to paste up the type for yearbooks. Some of the type was from hot metal but most was from the IBM Composer. So I drug out my yearbook from 1967 - the type was not nearly as nicely proportionally spaced as the memo. You could drive a truck between the word spaces. Even the old linotype machines didn’t have the nice tight character spacing of the memo. If you’ve got anything old and printed from the pre-cold type days, look at it yourself. I’m certainly not holding myself forth as an expert, but I have been dealing with type since 1968. In 1973, I worked at a newspaper where we did our captions on an IBM Composer. I don’t remember spacing coming out that good from there, either. Furthermore centering and justifying type was a big pain because you had to type everything twice. To be honest, I don’t remember if they had superior characters or not. But still, I lean toward the forgery, however reluctantly, since I’d love to see Mr. Bush brought down. But this isn’t doing it for me. In my never to be humble opinion, not until the advent of cold type and word processing did character spacing look so good. But, I could be wrong, and hope that I am.
“Later models of Selectrics replaced inked fabric ribbons with “carbon film” ribbons that had a dry black or colored powder on a “once-thru” clear plastic tape. These could be used only once but they were in a cartridge that was simple to replace. They also introduced auto-correction, where a sticky tape in front of the print ribbon could remove the black-powdered image of a typed character, and introduced selectable “pitch” so that the typewriter could be switched among pica (“10 pitch”), elite (“12 pitch”), and sometimes agate (“15 pitch”), even in one document. Even so, all Selectrics were monospaced – each and every character was the same width. Although IBM had produced a successful typebar-based machine, the IBM Executive, with proportional spacing, no proportionally-spaced Selectric office typewriter was ever introduced. There was, however, a much more expensive proportionally-spaced machine called the Selectric Composer which was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter.”
And again I point out that the spacing was still not that good. And one would need to know if the military routinely used these machines rather than the plain old IBM office typewriters. This, I believe, is the crucial question to be answered to nail this down.
I don’t understand this, unless I’m missing something about this story. These records, AFAIK, are NOT part of Bush’s military files. The WH would have no more info about them than anyone else. In fact, we do not know the source of these docs, as CBS is keeping that confidential.
As for whether or not to believe CBS, I think it comes down to this simple standard: I will not believe ANY news story like this that is not independently verified by more than one news source. Perhaps CBS, which already has its “scoop”, should turn all its evidence over to another network and have them weigh in.
Is that intentional spin of his comments? He said no such thing. He said: ''You can’t just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer." How you get from that to, “the documents are probably genuine” is beyond me. Let’s try to leave the spin out of this.
Ambushed said:
I would just like to point out that while the dearly departed December got routinely raked through the coals for linking to any sort of blog, we have now come full circle - now we have a Democratic defender ignoring the testimoney of numerous expert witnesses, the Washington Post, ]ABC News, and the beloved factcheck.org, and declaring the case closed because of a message on a blog.
Uh, Dr. Bouffard is now claiming that he was misquoted by the Boston Globe:
[quote]
I just interviewed Dr. Bouffard again, and he’s angry that the Globe has misrepresented him. He’s been getting hate mail and nasty phone calls since last night’s story was posted, and he wants me to correct the record. **He did not change his mind, and he and his colleagues are becoming more certain that these documents are forgeries. **
…
“But the more information we get and the more my colleagues look at this, we’re more convinced that there are significant differences between the type of the (IBM) Composer that was available and the questionable document.”
“The (new Selectric) typefaces sent to me invalidated the theory about the foot on the four (originally reported to INDC), but after looking at this more, there are still many more things that say this is bogus.”
“… there are so many things that are not right; ‘s crossings,’ ‘downstrokes’ …”
“More things were looked into; more things about IBM options. Even if you bought special (superscripting) keys, it’s not right. There are all kinds of things that say that this is not a typewriter.”
/quote]
Full interview at the linked article at INDC Journal.
If you’d like to assert that Bush was too stoned to recall his own service in the national guard, have at it! Otherwise, the president knows the truth of some of the assertions in these documents. So far, he’s not come forward and told us what he knows.
When he used his surrogates to blame the Kerry campaign for the release, he showed that he wasn’t playing the presidental ‘above the fray’ card here, so why doesn’t he tell us what he knows?
I wasn’t intending to spin, I was accepting the spin of the story: “Authenticity backed on Bush documents”. I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.
I’d still like to know people’s explanation for this:
“I think there’s a big question mark, like major news organizations are suggesting,” communications director Dan Bartlett said last night. “Obviously, we see the same things that other people are pointing out now. But at the time, I had every reason to believe that a major news organization had authentic documents.”
Again, let’s say that the memos are gross forgeries. Why would the White House think they were authentic at ANY time if Bush had not in fact disobeyed an order, not shown up, and used influence to avoid any of the consequences. They would have known instantly that what the documents said were false. And yet, here, again, we have the White House saying that they had every reason to believe that the documents were authentic, and commenting only on the controversy over the document’s themselves while STILL AVOIDING ANY COMMENT ON THE CONTENT.
Please, please explain how this is not, itself, utterly damning, irregardless of the documents.
I have absolutely no idea why he doesn’t. But if you are going to claim that the ONLY possible reason for his silence is that the claims are true, then that’s simply false. We’re talking about shit that happend thirty-five fucking years ago. Just as Kerry is having trouble remembering when and if he actually ever was in Cambodia (even though he claims it was seared into his memory), maybe Bush simply doesn’t remember. 35 years ago I was in high school. If you asked me to tell you whether or not I skipped out on some class or failed to show up for some test I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
The simple truth is WE DON’T KNOW. Speculating that you do know is simply wrong.
First of all I didn’t murder Vince Foster. Second of all, I never said that “I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of Sam Stone’s document” like the White House has said. So, try again.
If John Q. Voter doesn’t care why are Republicans falling over themselves trying to discredit the new documents? And why has this thread lasted 4 pages?
If the Republicans really thought that the average voter didn’t care, they would have stopped trying to discredit the documents, and said “to hell with it, believe it if you want to”.
Remebering the particular date or ceremony of some event is one thing. The documents allege that Bush disobeyed a direct order and then worked to use special influence to avoid the consequences. That isn’t some day to day thing that just slips your mind. Unless maybe it was so habitual that Bush barely even thought about such things.
Regardless, this isn’t even a matter of memory. The documents contents go directly against what the administration has been claiming the last few years about Bush’s service. And yet they continue to claim that they had no reason to believe that they were inauthentic, even in the same breath they seem to want to ride the forgery angle out of the new cycle. If I make a point of holding a press conference to announce that I killed somebody, and the next day a document shows up from that somebody claiming to still be alive, and I assert that I have no reason to believe the document is forged, you don’t think that sort of behavior is even the least bit questionable?
I haven’t done that. However, the similarity between this memo flap, and the president’s not-denial, denial in the Abu Ghraib case suggests, at least, some persistent and peculiar reasoning on Mr. Bush’s part.
This whole line of reasoning is bogus. If someone phoned me today and said, “We just found a document written by your high school principal. There’s no question it’s authentic. In it, he writes that another teacher claimed you were doing drugs, and he wanted it covered up because your mother was pressuring him”, I might be thinking, “What the hell? Mom did that? When? And why do they think I was doing drugs? I smoked pot a couple of times, but I don’t remember any teachers seeing me, and I damned sure don’t remember being punished. But hell, they’ve got this document. Have I forgotten something?”
Now, if I were a President, and immediately after being given this document to peruse I had a microphone stuffed in my face and asked to comment about it, I’d be silent. In the meantime, I’d be calling old friends, having my people try to track down the principal, etc.
I damned sure wouldn’t say anything until I knew exactly what I was dealing with. Even if I were 100% sure that the documents were phonies because I had a photographic memory and knew absolutely that they were false, I wouldn’t say anything until I had some proof to back me up. Because if the White House had said, “These are definitely forgeries”, and then CBS trotted out a dozen experts claiming they are authentic and an eyewitness who was lying through his teeth, then all hell would break loose and there would be a major scandal just before an election.
It may simply be that the whitehouse was blindsided with this and didn’t know how to respond. Silence is not proof of guilt.