I pass these along without comment, being bloggish. Interesting questions, nonetheless…
http://americablog.blogspot.com/archives/2004_09_05_americablog_archive.html
Easier than thinking for yourself, I’ll grant you that.
Airman, kindly pardon my ignorance but what does “DNIF” stand for? From what I gather, that’s a major stigma in the pilot world.
I find it mildly amusing that the same folks that wanted to string up the Clintons for discovering long-sought documents on a coffee table now are able to find missing documents the very minute that others find them.
What stands out for me is that Mr. Bush could have kept his flight status by simply submitting to a physical. That he did not tells me that he really did not want that physical, which if I am not mistaken included new tests for illicit drugs.
I was sent this article by a republican friend/nemesis. The title: **Bush’s National Guard years: Before you fall for Dems’ spin, here are the facts.
**
I’m curious if there’s any proof or refutable facts for this writer’s claims (i’m gonna snip it to pieces so go to the link in case I’m snipping a vital organ):
The writer then rambles on and I don’t want to get into that hooey, but is all of that true and verifiable?
This is getting really strange now.
The Drudge Report is asserting that the documents CBS News brought to light may well be forgeries. They use font uncommon to typewriters of the day, use proportional spacing, and use smaller size superscripts.
Bottom line is that the memos appear to have been written using MS Word.
If this is true, and I think it’s too early to tell yet, the implications for CBS News would be devastating, and the resulting fallout could easily damage Kerry.
How do Drudge et al explain this?
Or this from today’s press gaggle?
(* footnote added by the white house after the press conference)
Mr. Moto,
It seems to me that someone who went to all the trouble to forge those documents would have been a lot more careful than that. It also seems like CBS news would have investigated it far enough to discover something as obvious and visible as the font. So I’m skeptical of them being forgeries, but stranger things have happened. The forged Nigerian uranium documents come to mind. If those could have fooled so many people, then maybe these could have also.
If they are forgeries, I find it hard to believe that Kerry had anything to do with it. A stunt like that would be just too damn risky since getting caught would absolutely cost him the race. And if I were going to pull a frame-up like that, it would be something a lot more damaging than shirking Guard duty.
It’s always possible some zealous supporter did create forgeries but, as I said, I’m skeptical. I’m sure there will be more information forthcoming.
Manufactured interest, maybe. The media ran the stories about the Swiftees back when they first announced. It was part of the news cycle for a few days: you are simply being misleading when you claim that they “ignored” the story.
If you could defy reality like this on stage, you could join a circus. The media first breathlessly reported on the ad the Swiftees released, playing it more on the news than it ever played on paid tv. They discussed the book. It was only a few days into the news cycle that they started to see that the claims being made were utter garbage, contradicted by both documentation and recollection of others: even the previous recollections of the Swiftees themselves. Even so, the story got WEEKS of media attention that, no matter whether it debunked their lies or not, mostly played the story as a he said she said which made many people think that the lies had at least some creedence. Kerry was severely hurt by the whole controversy, and if he loses, many will blame his failure to respond to the story quickly enough as part of where he went wrong.
To claim that this was all somehow a gift to Kerry is a cruel joke. And I have real trouble believing that you actually even sincerely believe what you’re saying.
Say what you want about Barnes: his basic story not only checks out, but the Bush campaign has basically accepted it as true, and did so a while ago. That you persist to deny it is plain silly, given that Bush’s team has already conceded the basic issue. Barnes helped Bush get in the guard. Barnes admits that he did it on his own initiative, at the request of a Bush friend, not Bush himself. But he did pull strings to get Bush in the guard over more qualified people. This was a common practice, and it is no longer under serious dispute that it happened in Bush’s case.
Amusingly, your attack here is parrotting the RNC’s claim that Barnes was going to go back on his sworn testimony to claim that Bush’s family had requested special treatment. But Barnes hasn’t done that. Which leaves their attack and yours looking mighty misaimed. You and they are basically attacking the man while trying to keep quiet the fact that his basic story is true, and even they acknowledge it. Your only real complaint here is that he got to say so on national TV. Boo hoo.
This is no longer about whatever happened 30 years ago. This is about the administration being caught doing some pretty serious deception on the public about Bush’s service. They’ve now changed their story on this several times, and there has been an obvious effort to tiptoe around it with very careful language that would leave room for later positions without being actually honest about what had actually happened (such as “he got an honorable discharge” when the question is why he got one in light of the evidence that he didn’t report for duty and disobeyed seemingly pretty simple and direct orders to just get a medical exam).
It may even be that someone, in fact, cleansed his records before the governor’s race, which used to be tinfoil hat territory but now seems to have a lot of creedence (the only reason we have these new memos is because they were stored in a place no one thought to look until now).
The forgery case looks pretty weak at the moment. First of all, the White House today is trying to spin what the documents say (oh, nobody knows what he meant, the doucments prove that Bush was negotiating with his commanding officers for release from the order, etc.), not object to their content. If they were forgeries that said false things about Bush’s record, wouldn’t he know immediately and protest? Why would the White House so quickly accept them as authentic unless they knew and have known that what they say was true?
Secondly, many people have pointed out that the spacing in the document was indeed available at that time on typewriters, contrary to what some bloggers claimed.
Thirdly, CBS had experts check the documents over for authenticity. Maybe bloggers know more about typewriters and can instantly spot forgeries, but you’d think that actual experts with days to examine documents would be at least as sensitive to this as random people off the internet with just a few hours work, no? If not, major egg on CBS’ face.
It stands for Duty Not Involving Flying. Anything from medication to lapsing of currency (to missing a physical…) can make you DNIF. As a flyer I am not legally permitted to perform any other duties in an official capacity that do not correspond with my AFSC. I can assist, but I cannot, say, enter travel vouchers at milpay, or work on aircraft engines. I am qualified to do only one thing, and being DNIF is a disqualification, meaning that under those circumstances I am unable to perform my assigned job, making me nothing more than dead weight and putting the burden on other people to do more to make up for my inabilities.
It’s not the end of the world if it’s an accident that causes it, or if it’s an accidental lapse in some requirement (you should see the list of requirements we have every year-it’s something like 25-30 requirements, and that’s not even counting monthly currency), but if it’s due to laziness or a desire to avoid duty (i.e. avoid being deployed) you can see where there might be a problem. Too often you find people who don’t want to go so suddenly they’re sick, or they’re self-medicating (a big no-no for flyers), or any of a myriad of other reasons. So DNIF status without any outward signs of disability is viewed with suspicion, and failure to resolve that status in a prompt manner is seen as malingering.
I’ve been thinking some more about the font question. Why doesn’t somebody compare these documents to other documents in Killian’s files? It seems to me that if he did type the documents in question then there should be others that were done on the same typewriter.
As far as the memos being a forgery goes… Have a look at what the guy from Little Green Footballs did:
He opened Microsoft Word, left the margins and tabs at the default spacing, tabbed over three stops to put in the date, and then typed the memo exactly as it was written, letting Word paginate it as it saw fit.
He then printed the document on his printer, scanned it back in, and overlaid it with the original memo. It matches PERFECTLY. Font, character spacing, line spacing, word breaks, margins, kerning, superscript height, etc. It is a 100% perfect match.
What do you think the odds are that 30 years ago someone set up a typewriter to do proportional fonts and ‘th’ superscripting, and just happened to set the margins and line spacing up so perfectly that the output could be overlaid on a word-processed document 30 years in the future?
Go look at the image linked above. It looks like it might be just a copy of the original memo, but it’s the new word-created memo overlaid with 50% transparency over the original. You can barely tell the difference, and the author says that the only differences vanish when you use the printed version rather than the screencap he shows on the page.
I’m no expert on typography, so maybe there is some sort of explanation here. Maybe Microsoft modelled their default fonts and spacings and such on an old IBM Selectric, and just happened to choose the exact model and font ball of the typewriter that was in that guard office. Doesn’t seem likely.
Here’s yet another article regarding the documents
How do all you conspiracy theorists explain the white house release of two of the memos? Where they suckered again, as they were by the African yellowcake forgeries? Or does it go deeper than that, and the Bush administration actually planted these false documents with CBS, and then brought out their own copies to jack up the stakes in some whacked out hope of pinning it all on the democrats when everything falls apart?
If someone typed them back up in a word processor, why in hell would they go to the trouble of ‘aging’ them to make them look authentic? That in itself makes them a forgery - they are clearly being represented as copies of originals, and not transcriptions.
CBS has some serious explaining to do if these turn out to be forgeries. Unless the Kerry campaign was behind it, it’s no reflection on them. But damn, this makes CBS look partisan and foolishly incompetant. These were the guys who wouldn’t cover the Swiftboats because of their supposed high standards of evidence. But if these are forgeries, then CBS got caught in a mistake so blatant that a bunch of bloggers spotted the forgery that their ‘expert’ deemed authentic.
Squink: The memos the White House released were faxed to them by CBS. They were no in the White House’s possession before. And since they purport to be discussions between Bush’s superiors, Bush wouldn’t necessarily have known anything about them before CBS showed them to him.
The fact that the White House got copies of these in no way suggests that they are authentic.
Go look at the link. Look at the overlay of the Word document with the original. Do you honestly believe a match that close is a coincidence? And if you don’t believe the guy, try it yourself. He even posts the Word file on his web site so you don’t have to type the memo back in.
As tinfoil hat as that sounds, it actually makes more sense (but not much more) than the idea that the Kerry campaign would do something so stupid. Like I said before, I cannot believe they would take such an enormous risk for such minimal gain (and do it so incompetently). If you’re going to do something like that, you do it right and you make it something a lot more damning than shirking guard duty.
Why blame the Kerry campaign? If CBS got taken in, I think it would be more likely that it was some partisan somewhere with half a brain trying to ‘help’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kerry campaign originally went, “Huh? Where did these come from?”
Exactly. My fear is that, if they do turn out to be forgeries, some people will blame the Kerry campaign regardless of whether or not it makes any sense.
What exactly is the provenance of these documents? Has CBS said how they came into their possesion?