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Bush Service Memos Questioned
Twirlip of the Mists writes "Last night, CBS News released a set of memos dated 1972 and 1973 that are purported to raise questions about President Bush's National Guard service. Some are saying those memos might have been produced with a computer. Blogger Scott Johnson ran with the story first this morning, raising questions about the typography of the memos. Blogger Charles Johnson (no relation) went one step further, actually reproducing one of the memos in its entirety using Microsoft Word's default settings.
Matt Drudge is running the story now with a link to a CNS News article that includes quotes from typography experts at font foundries Afga Monotype and Bitstream.
There's a round-up of key facts about the story on this blogger's web site." The experts in the CNS News story and others could come to no conclusion, and even if the documents are not originals or photocopies of originals, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't faithfully retyped copies of originals. CBS continues to assert the documents are authentic.
While I agree with the assertion that these could be retyped, CBS is claiming that's not what has happened, that these are originals.
I've made a superimposed image of Word vs. the documents. They have been lined up according to the period after the '1' in the first paragraph. The 'originals' are in red, the Word version in blue.
That would be the cretin you want to get elected to the Whitehouse.
;-) How many people from IBM have you talked to today?
It's two words: White House.
Several people are claiming that they used Selectric golfballs with proportional pitch.
Impossible. The pitch on a Selectric isn't controlled by the type ball. It's controlled by the motor drive. The type ball just rotates and elevates to strike a letter on the paper. There's nothing about it that controls how far the type head advances on each letter strike.
but I certainly don't see how you claim to know the exact capabilities of every typewriter owned by the US military.
I've had sixteen hours now to work on this story.
IBM sold selectric golfballs with the th superscript at the time.
Yes. They were custom items that were machined to order and that cost a fortune. And they also could not produce variable-pitch type, nor could they produce Times New Roman type.
There is no reason why they could not have offered their IBM Executive series machines with a similar option.
Yes, there is: the Executive machines didn't use interchangeable type balls. They used a lever-arm mechanism. Either all Executive typewriters would have had the "th" glyph or none of them would have. None did. IBM never made one with that glyph.
And no, the typeface is not MICROSOFT anything, Microsoft has never designed a typeface ever. The Microsoft fonts are from Monospace corp.
LOL. You mean "Monotype?" Heh. When TrueType came along in the early 1990s (or was it late 1980s?) Microsoft licensed the name and the letter forms from Monotype, now Agfa Monotype. Microsoft implemented the font, which means they determined the letterspacing, kerning pairs and so on.
The CTO of Agfa Monotype, incidentally, is on the record saying that it was highly unusual for anyone to use proportional-pitch type in the 1970's. The technology just wasn't there.
The 'expert' you refer to is not regarded as such outside the US republican party.
Sorry, but that's simply not true. He's so influential in the industry of forensic document analysis that other researchers write papers about him.
There is only one google hit for Bouffard and typewriter that relates to a forensic case and that is a crank case involving UFOs.
Your Google-fu is lacking.
I write in my journal
A lot has been made of the fact that the text is proportionally spaced. Some have pointed out that a few typewriters has this ability.
Fine.
But what about kerning?
"In typography, kerning refers to adjusting the space between characters, especially by placing two characters closer together than normal. Kerning makes certain combinations of letters, such as WA, MW, TA, and VA, look better. "
There is kerning in the memo with SUBJECT: CYA. It happens between the 'f' and 'e' characters of "interference" and "feedback".
The trouble is that kerning requires remembering the previous character.
As advanced as typewriters might have been in 1973, I doubt any had memory.
The forgery camp has been making blanket statements that superscript "th" was utterly unavailable circa 1972. They have also said that proportional spacing was utterly unavailable circa 1972.
...
...or by forging them. Not sure we'll ever know which it was.
That's kind of an oversimplification. Okay, it's not really an oversimplification as much as it is out-and-out wrong. "They" have been saying since early Thursday morning that superscript type balls for the IBM Selectric were available, but only by custom order to IBM and at great cost. "They've" also been saying that the only typewriter that could produce the superscript "th" seen in the CBS memos could not have produced proportional letter-spacing.
I think it will be helpful for everyone to be very clear on exactly what is claimed to be anachronistic
The list is not a short one. Basically everything about these documents is wrong. The format is not correct. The typography is impossible with 1970's-era equipment. The signatures on the two signed memos do not match the signing officer's actual signature. One memo refers to an Air Force manual, AFM 35-13, that never existed; there was a regulation AFR 35-13, but it dealt with supplemental pay for soldiers who were proficient in a foreign language. And, of course, the contents of these memos is suspect because it doesn't jibe with any other account.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
I think the jury's still out on this.
Oh, technically it is. But we're not convicting a man of murder here. There's no reason to err on the side of caution -- either way. Do these documents appear to be forgeries? Yes, definitely. Is there anything about them that suggests they're not forgeries? Nope. Ergo
It is possible that some obscure custom typebar for the IBM Executive was in use
It is not possible, actually, according to representatives of IBM's media relations office. They have the records, and they say that no such custom-made Executives were ever produced.
Right now it looks to me like CBS screwed up bigtime.
Yes, either by passing off obviously forged documents
I write in my journal