Slashdot Mirror
New Bush Guard Records Released
rwiedower writes "Over the past 24 hours, several new stories have emerged surrounding President Bush's service in the National Guard. Memos from his commanding officer seem to indicate he was unhappy with Bush's desire to leave Texas, and that he felt Bush was going 'over his head' to get out of service. In true slashdot/military/government fashion, Killian even titled one memo 'CYA'. (The memos, in pdf format, are available here.)"
linky
lgf is a right leaning weblog, but I wanted to make sure that the right's talking points were also represented. I believe that the other point the right made (as seen on 60 minutes) was that this is a purely political move and merely the rehash of an attack that the right claims to have defused during Bush's first run for office.
My understanding is that if this information is new, then the right's argument doesn't hold water, and if these documents are truley forged, then the left has some splainin' to do.
Josh Marshall (of talkingpointsmemo fame) has the Brokaw interview here and the relevent memo text here.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but I wanted to clarify the assessment made by lgf: Their source is freerepublic.org (another like minded discussion board). The evidence they cite is that "every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.
/. readers can clear this up one way or the other.
In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. "
It is my hope that
Somebody questioned the credibility of a supposedly 1973 memo typed with a proportional font, and made a little experiment.
If you're too lazy to click on the link: the document typed with all default settings in Microsoft Word looks 1:1 identical, minus the "aging" probably induced by running through the photocopier 4-5 times.
One memo is really, really obviously typed up in MS Word (when you use the default settings, you get a document that looks precisely like the memo in question, all the way down to the default superscript "th").
While some parts of the military might have had really cool equipment, it's safe to say that an early 1970s National Guard unit wouldn't have a copy of Word floating about.