Via JoeUser.com…
You may have heard about the memos that’ve recently surfaced charging that President Bush didn’t complete his National Guard Service commitments.
The evidence for these claims largely came from a series of “newly discovered” documents allegedly written by now deceased Colonel Killian. Based on these documents, CBS’s 60 Minutes gave significant air time to the claim that Bush didn’t meet his National Guard duties and therefore has less credibility in what he says and does. … Here’s a link to one of the documents: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf
When looking at the technological aspects of the documents a few suspicious things stick out: the font is Times New Roman 12pt, the margins are 1.25″, the font is Kerned, the header is PERFECTLY centered…
Sure, way back then on a manual typewriter you could set the margins to 1.25″, you could spend a lot of manually centering the header… but Times New Roman on a typewriter? It didn’t exist… Kerning on a manual typewriter? Impossible. Typewriters can only type mono-spaced letters where the spacing of each letter is pre-set (for example, the T in “To” could not overhang the o (etc.) like it can with modern word processors.
Ironically, the most damning evidence that these are fake (read: fradulent) is when the memo’s are transcribed into Microsoft Office Word. If you overlay an MS Word version over the original (margins, centering, kerning, spacing, etc.), they don’t just “sorta match up,” the overlayment isn’t even fuzzy. It’s exactly right. So, somehow the author of the documents seems to have had a copy of Microsoft Word, with which to write these memos… Either that or Microsoft built their word processor around these particular memos.
In the second case, Microsoft must have had a copy of these memos since the 70’s… And the government has been concerned with antitrust?! How did MS get a copy of these memos? What other private, confidential, or even TOP SECRET memos do they have, and how did they get their hands on them? Since that’s not a realistic case, let’s look at the first case…
In the first case, they’re outright fradulent, and being only 50 some days out from a federal election, the purpose of the fake memos would be to influence the outcome of the election. Where did CBS get these memos? If it’s from the Kerry campaign (or even if it’s not) someone needs to face federal election fixing charges and go to prison for a long, long time.
What’s even more funny/disapointing, it wasn’t the 60 Minutes staff, nor even anyone at CBS (who had been told by 2 of 3 “experts” that the memo’s seemed fake) that caught these glaring mistakes, it was bloggers… What does that say about the credibility of CBS? Or of Big Media in general?
