Uh oh… Drudge has his ‘Alarm’ flashing. This is the headline:
Not looking good for CBS.
Here’s the story from ABC’s website
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Politics/Vote2004/bush_documents_040909-1.html
The ABC story covers the widow, but it glosses the son. AP has this on him:
Another article:
Son of Late Officer Questions Bush Memos
This is actually a good development for everyone - Kerry (unless the forgery is traced to his camp), Bush, and US. Because if a bunch of right-wing bloggers can catch CBS news distributing a forgery, left-wing bloggers can do the same thing. The mainstream media has to realize that they can be fact-checked, and if they are caught in sloppy journalism the blog world will spread the news quickly, and then intermediaries like Drudge will broadcast it to everyone.
The end result of episodes like this is going to be better information for all of us.
There’s one big loser here: CBS News. If these documents turn out to be forgeries, CBS just got out-researched by a bunch of amateurs on their blogs. This will be a huge hit to their credibility. And rightly so.
If the Kerry campaign is behind this and that comes out, Kerry is finished. But I don’t think that’ll be the case. As lots of people have said, if a big-time forger did this, it would have been done better. My guess is that this was some punk somewhere who managed to convince some gullible reporter that he had the real goods, and CBS in their zeal to print some documented dirt didn’t do due-diligence on the documents. Just my guess. Because if I wanted to forge something like this and I had some campaign money behind me, the first thing I’d do is go out and buy a 30 year old typewriter from a pawn shop and type it up on that. What kind of moron would forge something in Microsoft Word?
Sam: thank you. My point exactly. I’m not advocating that the doc is legitimate or not, but the LGF test seem very weak. DTP software was designed to create docs that emulate common desktop standards on cheaper/more plentiful platforms. To see a Word document emulating a Selectric, the vaunted interoffice document standard a couple of decades ago, seems not at all surprising.
Sam Stone, the fact that CBS is launching an internal investigation doesn’t really prove much of anything one way or the other. It could simply be a reaction to all the controversy.
I’m perfectly willing to accept that these things are in fact forgeries if that’s proven to be the case. But I find it really hard to swallow the idea that a forger would go to all of that trouble and then type them up in Word. It just seems completely ludicrous. [tinfoil hat]Unless he wanted the forgery to be obvious.[/tinfoil hat] As both Squink and I have said, there appears to be a lot of evidence in these documents showing that they were in fact done on a typewriter. Other people claim evidence that says otherwise. To my my mind the contrary “evidedence” has other possible explanations, things like standardization of fonts and tab-stops, etc. But the evidence that they were done on a typewriter (vertical misalignments, chunks of letters missing) doesn’t IMHO have an easy explanation other than that they were typed on a typewriter.
So we have two sets of contradictory evidence. One set which has reasonable alternative explanations (however unlikely some of you may find those explanations), and one set which, apparently, does not. I have to go with that second set. YMMV.
Oh, jeezus christ on a minibike. The superscripts were THE ONLY PART of the LGF comparison that differed from the original, and LGF held this out as an anomoly.
And now Lines claims that the superscripts, which are demonstrably different in MS Word, are proof of a forgery? Which is it?
I don’t know if these things were forged or not, but if they were, it looks to me like it was done on a typewriter.
How many of you here have actually looked at the documents on cbsnews.com? Forget for a moment what the “experts” are saying. Look for yourself and use your own judgement. To me, they obviously show the many shortcomings of a well used typewriter. These same shortcomings do not occur with a printed Word document. Show me where I’m mistaken. If I’m wrong I’m more than willing to be corrected.
To Sam:
On re-reading my posts, I’d like to clarify:
-
LGF claims that the superscripts from Word are the only things that don’t match the new documents, and offers no explanation.
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Lines claims that the superscripts exactly match Word superscripts, and this is evidence of a forgery.
These claims don’t seem compatible, correct?
Nick
Small [sup]th[/sup] in a Bush Guard document that no one disputes:
via TPM
As for CBS, they’re standing by the story:
Here’s the points of contention per the ABC article
For what it’s worth, here’s the link to Drudge’s CBS story
http://drudgereport.com/cbsd.htm
Actually, if you read the LGF article farther, he says that the difference in the ‘th’ only shows up when he used screen fonts. When he printed it on his laser printer and overlaid the original, the difference vanishes.
Davidm said:
Actually, the degredation looks to me like something that was repeatedly photocopied to make it look old. In fact, on either LGF or Powerline, someone did exactly that. They typed the thing up in Word, and then copied a copy of a copy with a copy machine. Then they scanned in the result, and it looks damned close to the ‘real’ document. Throw in a few photoshopped dots supposedly from a dirty FAX drum, and you’ve got an exact duplicate.
There’s certainly something odd on both sides of the story. On the one, the documents sure look forged. But on the other, it doesn’t make much sense. Surely no one in the Kerry campaign would have been so stupid as to float such an obvious forgery. And how did it get past CBS’s ‘experts’? How come that every other forensic document I’ve read (and I’ve now read five or six of them) says that they are highly likely to be forgeries. How could CBS come up with four experts so diametrically opposed to the aggregate opinions of their peers?
I suspect that if these turn out to be forgeries, it’ll turn out to be the fault of someone who sidestepped the authentication process. Someone like Dan Rather himself, or maybe some exec in the news department who found a ‘source’ and got taken, and was too arrogant to think the rules applied to him.
ABC is really on this. Apparently, the supposed author’s widow is furious about this, because she says her husband said glowing things about Bush, didn’t type, and is now dead and can’t defend himself. This woman is going to be on “Nightline” tonight. There was two ABC news articles on the web about this already. I think they’re taking the opportunity to take a chunk out of a main competitor in news.
Okay, I’ve been reading that abcnews article and the point about Times Roman is interesting. Poking around on Google a little, it does appear that Times Roman was used by printers by not on typewriters. So, are the documents in fact in Times Roman font and is it true that Times Roman was never used in typewriters?
OK, so the diffence that Lines examines vanishes in your scenario. Which proves that Lines is wrong. How is this helping your case ?
The Bush campaign on the other hand, would benefit greatly from having a poor forgery exposed. Not only would that reflect badly on the “Bush Bashers”, but it’d also screw up terminally any attempt to get to the bottom of what the President actually did or did not do in the national guard.
It’s a good thing the Bush campaign had nothing to do with those Swift Boat Veterans guys, or I’d suspect that Karl Rove might done the math, connected the dots, and staged a (phoney) preemptive strike here.
This is what is making me so skeptical of the “experts” in this whole mess. They seem to be contradictiong each other, so who the hell do we believe?
God help me but I’ve been thinking the same thing. I hate to venture into the territory of that kind of paranoid conspiracy theory but this administration has been making it harder and harder for me not to do that. If this is a forgery (and it is starting to look that way) then the only halfway sane explanation is that it was a forgery that the perpetrator wanted to be exposed as a forgery. And we all know who would benefit the most from that!
The only problem with that is, just like I said about the Kerry campaign, why would they risk getting caught in such a harebrained scheme?
It may very well be that some idiot Kerry supporter[sup]*[/sup] went to a lot of trouble getting all the details right then screwed up by typing it up in word.
[sup]*[/sup]Just to be clear - I’m not calling all Kerry supporters idiots. I’m a strong Kerry supporter. I’m calling this one particular hypothetical supporter an idiot. All parties have 'em. He’s ours. Maybe we can make him our mascot or something.
IBM’s had proportional spacing since the early 40s.
Times New Roman came out first (1930s), then Times Roman. Times new was spiffed up a bit in the 80s, but mostly a smoothing of a few curves, nothing drsastic; I doubt anything you could tell from a scanned copy. Not sure what was used more in typewriters.
http://www.truetype.demon.co.uk/articles/times.htm
"“Times Roman” is the name used by Linotype, and the name they registered as a trademark for the design in the U.S. “Times New Roman” was and still is the name used by The Monotype Corporation. The face was developed by The Times newspaper for its own use, under the design direction of Stanley Morison. Originally cut by the Monotype Corp. in England, the design was also licensed to Linotype, because The Times used Linotype equipment for much of its actual production. The story of “The Times New Roman” can be found in Stanley Morison’s A Tally of Types, published by Cambridge University Press, with additional, though not quite the same, versions in Nicolas Barker’s biography of Stanley Morison, and in James Moran’s biography of SM. (There should be an apostrophe in that name, “Times’ Roman”, I suppose, though no-one uses it.)
During WWII, the American Linotype company, in a generous spirit of Allied camaraderie, applied for registration of the trademark name “Times Roman” as its own, not Monotype’s or The Times’, and received the registration in 1945. "
I also typed up a memo; it took me 14 tries to get as close as I did; I had to use 13 pt font and turn off all formatting (word’s defaulting was making the 111th formatting at the start really weird). And here is my result: http://www.triorb.com/stuff/gwbdoc2.gif I lined it up according to the “M” on memorandum, and had to adjust my margins way to the right to fit in enought words at the right font size. Maybe other people’s defaults are the same, but mine didn’t match up so well. Some of it could be warpage from many copies, but really, if you have the right font and use basic default settings, you can come pretty close to the typewritten/typeset look if you like; that’s the whole point! Fonts/tabs/margins are supposed to be uniform for multiple decades. Try it yourself! Heck, I’m suspicious that the blogger matched up SO perfectly, after the distressing that a forged doc would have to go through, you’d expect some drift of lines (though not individual characters). I think the blogger’s either pulling some legs or he has a helluva lot more pristine copy than I’ve seen.
I don’t make a comment on the supposed forgeries, I have an interest in fonts but I’m sure the experts know more. But I do know we’ve had proportional fonts for some time, plus special characters; it is not outrageous to think that people who spend a lot of time talking about the 84th or 11th or 3rd division would have the special characters for that. I used to have 1/2 and 3/4 characters on my typewriters; I think I had rd and th charcters as well. And I beleive the WH accepted the docs?
Thanks for that info. I had thought that Times New Roman was created in the 1980’s. I seem to recall something about licensing Times Roman for Postscript use or something like that, so someone created TNR to get around the issue. But maybe that’s just some computer folklore or something.
I did the same comparison you did, Gaudere. Mine came out significantly better. Almost as good as LGF’s, or maybe as good. I didn’t spend a ton of time sizing and moving the layer around and rotating it to find the perfect match. I just stretched it around until I was convinced that it could be matched that well. I did notice a couple of letters that seemed to differ slightly, but it could have been the difference between screen and printer fonts, for all I know.
But what surprised me is not the font shapes being exact, because like you say there are only tiny differences between some of them - differences that may not show on a poor copy on a computer screen. But the spacing surprises me. The leading, character spacing, etc. Now I know those are also part of the font specification, but I didn’t expect it to be that precise. By the end of a long sentence the characters are still lined up perfectly.