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[bryant]

You know what? This document was not created in 1973. Maybe it's a transcription, but that's Times New Roman, and those are curly apostrophes, and there's just no way. Also, it's a lousy CYA memo, since it's just claims with no backing evidence.

CBS needs to provide an evidence trail for those memos, or give up on their authenticity.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

Here's the two questions I want everybody to answer:

1. Does this change your opinion about Bush's service/AWOL status/etc.?

2. Will it change your vote in the upcoming election?

This is a tempest in a fucking teapot. The memo doesn't prove anything whether it's real or not.

[bryant]

Doesn't matter what my answer is; what matters is perception. And yeah, I think this will matter -- if it's proven a forgery, that makes it easier to convince waverers that the whole AWOL thing is bogus.

Which makes a difference. Not a huge one, but a difference.

[gentlyepigrams]

This doesn't change anyone's perception. The facts are murky enough that you can support any position from them. Only political junkies care about the details--and they already know how they're going to vote. Three weeks from now, this will be buried under the next new hot election freshness.

[bryant]

The facts of what Bush did, sure. But... it is becoming painfully clear that the DNC was crowing about a self-evident forgery, and that's where the problem is.

It's not about what happened in Texas, it's about public perception of the parties.

[gentlyepigrams]

But is it going to change your vote? Is it going to change anyone's vote?

See, that's where I come from. None of this horse race stuff or Vietnam stuff or anything is going to change votes. Barring disaster on one side or the other, the debates won't do it. What will do it? A terrorist attack, a major foreign policy problem, a major and immediate domestic problem. That's about it. People are too polarized for anything else to do it.

This will all be forgotten in three weeks, except by partisan hacks. And even my partisan hacks are partisan hacks.

[bryant]

Ah, but just because my vote is solid and your vote is solid and Glenn Reynolds' vote is solid doesn't mean there aren't undecided voters. One reason I've been so confident Kerry will win is because they're leaning strongly towards Kerry... but it's a damned close election.

It's the small percentage of people who aren't yet polarized who are going to matter.

And... three years from now, people are gonna be trotting this one out as evidence that the media is biased towards liberals. I'd bet on it.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I've actually seen the curved single quote in electric machines. So that's not diagnostic, same as the superscript or proportional isn't (some people clearly had way too little time on typewriters. All should suffer!) But I find the fact that the spacing algorithm is so close to be suspicious. And when eyeing the memo with a doubtful eye it starts to look way too smooth for early seventies type; and the content seems awfully pat.

But it shouldn't be too hard to determine; doesn't the FBI keep a database of typewriter forensics for just this sort of identification?

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

If you compare it to files on the FBI FOIA site, you can tell the difference between the fonts and kerning of a true typewriter created memo and that memo.

HOWEVER, if you read some of the newspaper print from that same era, or in the file I am looking at, 1934, the fonts look remarkably the same, with the same commas, the same character spacing, the same kerning, the same serifs.

So honestly, it's difficult to say if it's a forgery or not. I can find evidence, and very quickly, of either way.

[bryant]

It oughta look like newspaper print -- that's where Times New Roman comes from.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing: if I go digging through the FBI FOIA files, looking for items late 1960s-early 1970s, I can very much find memos in the files that look exactly like the CYA memo in font, kerning, spacing, etc. So should I assume that either a) the FBI had time travel or b) electric typewriters that came out in that period wrote text that looked like that?

You're welcome to look, too. I mostly read mob stuff, for reference.

I just don't know if I buy the "it is a forgery" until an "Expert" with an actual name comes out and has some salient proof. Until then, it's all blogosphere nattering.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

All of the "self-evident" refutations have been crap (and there have been about 6 different reasons why it "couldn't" be true today.

That doesn't mean it's genuine. And CBS could do more to validate their source. I'm skeptical of the provenance, but I'm hella more skeptical of the full court press by LGF and Drudge, who seem to be shouting any and every thing they can to try to drown out any criticism of Bush.

This seems like it's partisan all the way around.

But frankly, I don't think that even if it turns out to be true, and it's evidence that demonic democratic officeholders from Texas pulled strings for a congressman's kid who didn't know what was going on, even in that case I don't think it's votes in anyone's pockets. If it turns out to be true or if it turns out to be a forgery, nobody is convinced to change their opinion of Bush.

Not to argue, because I don't think it matters...

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

But...The font in the memo doesn't match my "Times New Roman" very well at all. The bottom of the descender in the "j" is wrong. The top of the "i" below the dot is flat not slanted. The "t" isn't curved properly. The width of the Capital "H" crossbar looks wrong. It may be related to Times Roman, but it's not TNR. It's not Times Roman, either. Or any of the fonts on my system.

Why do you think it's TNR? And if it is, why is that relevant? Times Roman was commissioned in 1932 and was in use in Typewriters long before 1973.

Re: Not to argue, because I don't think it matters...

[bryant]

Gotta allow for some distortion via fax and copying process, though. And much to my regret, no matter how many times I look at it, the letterspacing is the same. If I type four or five lines of text and switch the typeface around -- serif text typefaces in all cases -- I find that the line breaks come after different words with each typeface. So I'm pretty damned sure it's Times Roman.

It's relevant because Occam's Razor applies here.

Re: Not to argue, because I don't think it matters...

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

Occam's Razor would not allow you to say that all the vertical lines are clearly vertical, but there is even distortion in the tops of the horizontal serifs that makes the serif marks turn from the Times New Roman angle (or even the Times Roman angle, they're slightly different) to be 90 degrees from the vertical.

The characters are just different. Don't take my word for it, try any passage with lowercase "b","d","t","i", etc. on the Linotype sample page for TNR. Compare the letter shapes between the PDF and the generated TNR sample.
http://www.linotype.com/webshop/fontsampler/rip.class?&fname=Times+New+Roman%99+Roman&id=13296

The case as stated doesn't hold up. Doesn't mean it's not correct, just that this isn't proof.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

were selectrics doing proportional font at that point in time?

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

No. IBM Executive models were doing proportional fonts. That was the difference between them and Selectrics. The Executive was first released in 1948, replacing the 04, released in 1941, which also did proportional spacing.

I have no information on the commonness or uncommonness of proportional font producing typewriters, but they are older the GWB.

[head58.livejournal.com]

I guess my question w/r/t this memo is why would it be typed at all? It seems to be written in a very emotional state, and I'd expect this kind of note to maybe be hand-written. Or at least to have some typos and eraser marks. Unless someone in the secretarial pool transcribed it from a handwritten note (and that might explain the scribbles in the upper left, lower right, and also why it looks so smooth and well-typed. I have a hard time picturing a very upset military officer using the superscript function).

And I totally agree that it covers no ass at all. Which is weird.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

That's a good question, actually. Two good questions. I wish I had a better feel for "who" was supposed to be the audience of the CYA memo. Is it for himself? Is it for another officer? Is it a reminder in case he gets asked about it by HQ and has to explain what he did? Where was it filed and why?

It raises a lot of questions.

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

I think the handing it to a secretary and having it typed and filed is probably right on.

People don't think much about these things at the time -- they just write them down. For good, for bad, it just goes. Then they get dropped on the pile with the rest of the paperwork nonsense, and off it goes through a typewriter and into a file.

I mean, all over my desk, I have all kinds of inane things that just get dumped into filefolders in my drawer. Who knows why these things get filed except habit.

[head58.livejournal.com]

There's a big post over at Daily Kos that beats the hell out of the forgery argument. Or at least many of the "it must be a forgery because XYZ" arguments. Just FYI.

[bryant]

A lot of the "it must be a forgery because XYZ" arguments /really/ suck. The superscript argument is dumb. The "Times Roman wasn't invented then" argument is dumb.

My single biggest reason for thinking it's a forgery is the congruence of line endings. I'm going to actually buy Bembo and type out the document to do a comparison tonight.

[kodi]

Ok, so I'm sitting around, and I'm thinking, "Hey, I'll play a joke - I'll write up a memo saying 'Bush blows goats. I have proof. -- Hoover.'" And yeah, I'll just pull up Word, maybe PrtSc it to GIMP and make it harder to read, then throw it up on the web and see who bites.

On the other hand, I'm thinking, "I'm going to forge a document to prove that the Leader of the Free World blows goats," I'd like to think I'm smart enough to run down to Goodwill and snag a 40 year old typewriter for the task, or at least switch over to Courier, because it's what people think of when they think "typed memo."

If the document was forged, and the forgers expected it to be taken seriously, I have to think that they are very careless not to have even bothered to find the Font drop-down in Word. I suppose it's possible that they are under the age of 25, and are actually unaware what common typewriters are like. But really. You're forging a 31-year-old document, and your first instinct is to fire up Word, use the default font and margins, and type out the document? That's so hard for me to swallow - almost as hard to swallow as the coincidence that a 31-year-old document would happen to look almost exactly like it would if it were created with Word using the default font and margins.

[bryant]

That last paragraph summarizes my feelings rather nicely.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

you know, if it's a forgery... doesn't that kind of remind you of the time that the gore campaign got an overnight package with bush debate strategy that (iirc) turned out to be a rove dirty trick? or is it just me?

[bryant]

Yeah, definitely.

Also reminds me of John Sasso and the Biden/Kinnock tape.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Y'know, Rovian dirty trick was my first thought too, but I've been rethinking. Even if it is debunked, it still means more news cycles focused on Bush's TANG (non)service. That's awfully damaging to your own candidate for a dirty trick.

So my current theory: if it's a forgery, the most likely source is someone involved at the time who recently typed up fake memos to validate his story. It would explain the most mysterious aspect of this so far: the White House hasn't denied anything, not even Bush disobeying a direct order. Instead they spun it as 'he was working with his superiors to solve the problem.' That's just *odd*, if they are complete fakes. Surely Bush would remember that he didn't do that. It would explain why the general thought they sounded authentic; the facts and sentiments expressed were what the forger really heard or saw.

It's so hard to see any external person spending enough time with Bush's other, validated records to get things like title and PO Boxes right, seeing all those monospace ancient fonts, not once thinking 'hey! I should get a typewriter, or at least a typewriter font!' While someone who was there at the time might have done it from memory, and being an amateur being sloppy enough to just use Word.

[bryant]

Yah. I would also buy the possibility that someone transcribed valid memos.

Yah.

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to see someone who's in general rather more sober and, well, fair-and-balanced than me about politics entertain that possibility.

The problem -- and the genius of it, if that's what really happened -- is that to anyone for whom the forgery makes a difference, there's no way you'll convince them Rove could have been behind it (if indeed he was). This is a masterful dirty trick, if that's what it is. (But if it's such an obvious forgery, what the hell was CBS doing vetting it so sloppily? Or is there a Rove mole there too?) Round and round.

Superscript Me

[head58.livejournal.com]

cnn.com's coverage of the story has a few quotes from an alleged "document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences" claiming the superscript is a dead giveaway it was a forgery. Which is weird, since IBM models apparetntly did.

You know, if I were making a fake memo that was supposed to be from 1973, I'd DAMN WELL not use superscript if it could be questioned at ALL that such a typeface was used back then.

And while I'm pondering, didn't this memo come out of some file in the Pentagon that they just dug up this week, among some stuff they said they couldn't find before? If so, how did the "forged" document get planted in the file? Or am I wrong about the origin of this file?

Re: Superscript Me

[bryant]

Wrong origin -- I'm hearing (though not confirmed) that these came from the DNC.