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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

[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.