The charges themselves have been all but corroborated by the White House
That's not correct.
and certainly nobody is denying the content is true.
Also not correct.
The only (campaign) issue is whether these actual embodiments are from the time period they claim to be.
Actually, the campaign issue is whether a major news organization used memos which it either (1) knew or (2) reasonably should have known were falsified as the basis for a story which was released with the intent of influencing the outcome of the election.
Who really cares if someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document?
How can you not?
The point is that Bush dropped the ball when he was supposed to be defending the country in the 1970's, a job he got by virtue of being his father's son in the first place.
See, those are the two allegations that these memos were alleged to support, but that in the absence of these memos turn out to be completely unfounded. Ben Barnes has been alleging that somebody pulled strings to get Bush into the Guard since the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race. There's absolutely no evidence to support that allegation. In fact, in 1999, Barnes himself recanted his own story through his attorney. And the "he disobeyed an order" thing was concocted out of whole cloth, apparently either by Bill Burkett or by somebody who then passed the story on to Burkett.
These are two allegations which simply are not true. And yet you're repeating them like they're revealed gospel. Could it be that you're suffering from Dan Rather Syndrome?
Um. No. Even CBS News says now that the story never should have gone on the air.
includes a lot of interviews
Mostly interviews that torpedoed the story. But you didn't hear anything about those on 60 Minutes.
including, now, to the secretary who says "I didn't type those. But I typed ones that said about the same thing"
That's not at all what she said --go read the transcripts --and she's also the same person who was quoted in the Dallas Morning News as saying that the thought Bush was "selected, not elected." No possible agenda there, no sir.
The Globe (and CBS) showed pretty darn conclusively that Bush reneged, was AWOL, that it was covered up/excused, and that he's lying and/or stonewalling when he says different and at the same time, he and his proxies are attacking Kerry's war record.
Wow. That's the precise opposite of what the record actually shows. Amazing.
Did George W. Bush sign up for a six-year commitment? Yes. Did he fulfill every obligation during his service? Yes. When he transferred to Alabama, did he give up his flight status because there was no place on the flightline for him? Yes. Did he request an early discharge? Yes. Was he granted that early discharge? Yes.
Is there any evidence at all that George W. Bush did anything improperly or incompletely? No. Ben Barnes insists that he pulled strings for Bush, but he simply can't produce any evidence to that effect, and everybody else involved maintains that it simply isn't true.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your personal hatred, now.
Wow. You just kinda vomited all over the keyboard there, didn't ya? I know you're probably so furious about the coming landslide that you can barely see straight, but could you maybe put just a little effort into at least concocting the appearance that your post is in some way topical or relevant?
So, because these documents were forged, it means George W. Bush honorably and fully completed his commitment to the National Guard, right?
Well, actually...yeah. Given that the only documentary evidence of misconduct that anybody has ever been able to cough up has turned out to be forged, yes, this basically means that the "Bush went AWOL" non-story can finally be put to bed once and for all.
There are idiots out there who will fight to keep it alive, of course, but there are people who insist we never landed on the moon, either.
remember their huge, explosive, damaging piece of work about side straddle gas tanks on pickups?
Sigh. That was Dateline NBC. I'm as annoyed by this story as anybody, but can we please at least make a token effort to get the most basic facts right?
Notice they didn't retract the story -- just retracted the authenticity of the memos.
Um. No.
I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where--if I knew then what I know now--
I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.
That's a retraction. Of the whole story.
If GW was a citizen rather than The President, he'd have a slam-dunk slander case.
No, he wouldn't. In order to collect damages for defamation, you generally have to prove that the publishing agency acted with the clear knowledge that the information wasn't true. Proving that the absence of probative evidence --a memo from Rather saying that the story is crap but that he's going to run it anyway because he hates that bastard Bush--is essentially impossible.
That one's been asked and answered. These documents are not in any way official, whether they're real or not. Since there was no intent to defraud, even signing a dead man's name is not illegal. At the very, very worst, CBS News might have committed libel, but the standard for libel is very strict, and such a claim probably would not hold up in court.
That's the most ignorant statement I've heard all day. That's like saying that darkness is a threat.
Poverty is nothing more or less than the relative condition caused by the absence of wealth. We draw an arbitrary line and say that people with less than X wealth are living in poverty while people with more than X wealth are not.
What you really mean here, what you're really talking about, is not poverty but rather inequity. You're one of those "let's make everyone equal" nutcases who thinks that communism is actually a pretty good idea that was never implemented correctly.
Attempts to understand the root causes of support for radicalism
Attempting to understand the root causes of terrorism does one thing and one thing only: it guarantees, with absolute certainty, that the next guy who has a beef is going to blow up a building to get attention.
Stop bombing people into the ground and it just might not happen to you.
"Just might not" isn't good enough. If we continue bombing everybody who supports terrorism back into the stone age, eventually folks will get the message that terrorism is a bad idea all around.
It is about putting peace before closing your eyes to world suffering.
La la, sunshine, lollypops and rainbows. What a fucking tool.
The UN is an institution based on democratic principles.
No, it's not. It is, in fact, completely indifferent toward democratic principles. none of the representatives to the UN are elected by the people they represent. They are appointed, many by governments that we would not consider to be legitimate much less wholly democratic.
Mostly it is a symptom of living in a large mostly urban country.
More than 200,000,000 Americans live in places --towns, villages, unincorporated areas --with populations of less than 50,000.
If you mean "urban" as in "something other than subsistence farming," then you're right. But if you mean "urban" as in "the upper west side," you're mistaken.
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No witnesses have said that Lt. Bush was given an order. That story comes solely from a document, a document which has been demonstrated conclusively to be a forgery.
Nobody ever disputed that Bush skipped his last flight physical and that he let his flight status lapse. That was old news in 1994, 1998 and 2000. What's disputed is that Bush disobeyed a direct order. And that's a claim that comes only from this document, this forged document.
You lost any crediblity when you said people were being treated nice at Guantanamo.
Been there lately? No? Then shut the fuck up, okay? Okay.
LOL. Typical crazy-person thinking. Orders are documented, okay? Where's the documentation of this order? It's not a memo created last July in Microsoft Word, I can tell you that for damn sure.
I think the mere fact that there exists an entire Web site dedicated to providing documentation for the product testifies to what a lousy product it is.
Twirlip of the Mists has strongly implied the documents are forgeries
I'm not implying it. After three days of research, I'm saying it outright. These memos are forgeries, and inept ones at that.
despite the CBS experts
Actually CBS has only produced one expert, and all he talked about was the signature, and all he said was that it wasn't obviously forged.
Which is, of course, irrelevant. Given two minutes and a copy of Photoshop, anybody can put any signature on any document.
despite the contradictory statements here and elsewhere
"Nuh uh" is not a contradictory statement.
despite living persons saying the alleged author of these documents had said these concerns to others
MG Hodges didn't say that. CBS said he said that, but upon hearing his words misrepresented, he recanted. He was read the memos over the phone (he never saw them) and said, "If that's what Jerry Killian wrote, that must be what he felt."
of course I'm not even going to listen to anyone else
You weren't listening to anyone before, you shithead. What's the difference.
Times New Roman is a clone of Times Roman carefully designed to have identical metrics as Times Roman.
Apparently false. Scroll down to the part where the author talks about all the different varieties of Times New Roman.
Um... you might want to look up the IBM Selectric Composer.
Funny you should mention that. On the exact same site, a guy (a reporter, evidently, or maybe just a really determined blogger) found somebody with the only known working Selectric Composer in North America. They tested it to see if it could produce these memos. Turns out it couldn't. And they've got lots of documentation explaining why.
Also, the Composer wasn't a typewriter at all. It was a typesetting machine. Completely different.
The Executive's default font is a wide-bowl serif font that doesn't resemble Times. But IBM sold a number of optional fonts for the Executive.
LOL. Good one. Spit Dan Rather's dick out and go see what real reporters are doing. You know, the kind who go find out things and tell you about them, instead of just making shit up?
Seing as the person who was the recipient says that he was told things like this by the person who reportedly wrote this memo, what more do you really need?
We need to know why these memos are forgeries.
We'd also like to know why MG Hodges stopped answering his phone. He hasn't picked up all day.
Where on earth did you get a cost figure of 20k$ for a Selectric?
The IBM Selectric was a different machine. The IBM Selectric Composer was a cold-type typesetting machine that sold new from IBM for about $20,000.
Gee, now, why would the 111th want a th ball? How silly of a concept.
For starters, because they weren't the "111th." They were the "111TH." Air Force style calls for the unit designation to be in all caps in all official documents and correspondence. The 111th would never need to refer to itself except in all caps.
False and false. The Selectric Composer and Selectric Executive both could.
Okay, you're diverging wildly from the truth here.
1. The Selectric Composer was not a typewriter; it was a typesetter. It did proportional letterspacing but it did not have a Times New Roman type ball. The closest it has was Press Roman, a distinctly different face.
2. There was never any such thing as a "Selectric Executive." You're talking about the IBM Executive, maybe? It did proportional spacing but did not have interchangeable type balls. The output of an IBM Executive more closely resembled Century than it did Times. The two could not be confused. Also, the Executive could not type a superscript "th."
Where did you get that? You type it once, and then you tell the typewriter to print it (sort of like a word processor), at least judging from a cursory read of the manual.
Try a more-than-cursory read. The Selectric Composer was an entirely mechanical device with no electronics in it at all. It had no memory. To set a line of type, you typed the line with the ball disengaged and read the spacing numbers off of the colored indicator. Then you returned the carrier head to the beginning of the line and manually set the spacing wheel, then you retyped the line. Very time-consuming, and it required special training to use.
I'll disagree, and more importantly, the handwriting experts hired by CBS disagree.
CBS has yet to produce any evidence supporting their assertion that either a handwriting expert or a document analyst looked at these memos. Other experts have gone on the record as saying that these documents are most likely forgeries. See today's article in the Post or the one in the Sun Times.
This memo isn't related to Barnes. Barnes's statements are old news; he testified as much in a deposition a decade ago, and it wasn't contested then.
Barnes said that the Bush family or a friend of the Bush family (his story changed halfway through) used influence to get special treatment for George W. Bush. There was no evidence of this allegation, and it was debunked by everybody from the New York Times to the AP to the Houston Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times. His statement was hardly "not contested."
These memos serve two purposes, politically speaking. One of the indicates that 1LT George W. Bush was ordered to undergo a flight exam two months early, an allegation that is not supported anywhere else and that, now, is not believed. The other purpose is to back up Barnes' story of improper influence. But, again, that story is now not believed because the only documentary evidence to support it is a forgery.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's a widely believed fact!"
But, he wasn't elected. That's a statement of fact, not an agenda.
Actually, it's an out-and-out lie. But whatever.
Frankly I have not gone off and done all the research into every little detail of this
No. Really?
Sure, the documents are forgeries, but is the story true or false?
Okay, that's about the stupidest comment ever.
The story is, "These memos show that Bush blah blah something bad blah blah."
The memos are forgeries.
The story, therefore, is automatically false.
Use your brain for a minute, huh?
The charges themselves have been all but corroborated by the White House
That's not correct.
and certainly nobody is denying the content is true.
Also not correct.
The only (campaign) issue is whether these actual embodiments are from the time period they claim to be.
Actually, the campaign issue is whether a major news organization used memos which it either (1) knew or (2) reasonably should have known were falsified as the basis for a story which was released with the intent of influencing the outcome of the election.
Who really cares if someone forged, misrepresented or just misunderstood the nature of this document?
How can you not?
The point is that Bush dropped the ball when he was supposed to be defending the country in the 1970's, a job he got by virtue of being his father's son in the first place.
See, those are the two allegations that these memos were alleged to support, but that in the absence of these memos turn out to be completely unfounded. Ben Barnes has been alleging that somebody pulled strings to get Bush into the Guard since the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race. There's absolutely no evidence to support that allegation. In fact, in 1999, Barnes himself recanted his own story through his attorney. And the "he disobeyed an order" thing was concocted out of whole cloth, apparently either by Bill Burkett or by somebody who then passed the story on to Burkett.
These are two allegations which simply are not true. And yet you're repeating them like they're revealed gospel. Could it be that you're suffering from Dan Rather Syndrome?
The story was well researched
Um. No. Even CBS News says now that the story never should have gone on the air.
includes a lot of interviews
Mostly interviews that torpedoed the story. But you didn't hear anything about those on 60 Minutes.
including, now, to the secretary who says "I didn't type those. But I typed ones that said about the same thing"
That's not at all what she said --go read the transcripts --and she's also the same person who was quoted in the Dallas Morning News as saying that the thought Bush was "selected, not elected." No possible agenda there, no sir.
The Globe (and CBS) showed pretty darn conclusively that Bush reneged, was AWOL, that it was covered up/excused, and that he's lying and/or stonewalling when he says different and at the same time, he and his proxies are attacking Kerry's war record.
Wow. That's the precise opposite of what the record actually shows. Amazing.
Did George W. Bush sign up for a six-year commitment? Yes. Did he fulfill every obligation during his service? Yes. When he transferred to Alabama, did he give up his flight status because there was no place on the flightline for him? Yes. Did he request an early discharge? Yes. Was he granted that early discharge? Yes.
Is there any evidence at all that George W. Bush did anything improperly or incompletely? No. Ben Barnes insists that he pulled strings for Bush, but he simply can't produce any evidence to that effect, and everybody else involved maintains that it simply isn't true.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your personal hatred, now.
Wow. You just kinda vomited all over the keyboard there, didn't ya? I know you're probably so furious about the coming landslide that you can barely see straight, but could you maybe put just a little effort into at least concocting the appearance that your post is in some way topical or relevant?
Actually, I would argue that fraud was the only intent.
To defraud means to deprive somebody of money by lying.
I don't see why a person should be allowed to make fake government documents
These are not government documents. Even if they were real, they would not be official anything.
So, because these documents were forged, it means George W. Bush honorably and fully completed his commitment to the National Guard, right?
...yeah. Given that the only documentary evidence of misconduct that anybody has ever been able to cough up has turned out to be forged, yes, this basically means that the "Bush went AWOL" non-story can finally be put to bed once and for all.
Well, actually
There are idiots out there who will fight to keep it alive, of course, but there are people who insist we never landed on the moon, either.
remember their huge, explosive, damaging piece of work about side straddle gas tanks on pickups?
Sigh. That was Dateline NBC. I'm as annoyed by this story as anybody, but can we please at least make a token effort to get the most basic facts right?
Um. No.
That's a retraction. Of the whole story.
If GW was a citizen rather than The President, he'd have a slam-dunk slander case.
No, he wouldn't. In order to collect damages for defamation, you generally have to prove that the publishing agency acted with the clear knowledge that the information wasn't true. Proving that the absence of probative evidence --a memo from Rather saying that the story is crap but that he's going to run it anyway because he hates that bastard Bush--is essentially impossible.
That one's been asked and answered. These documents are not in any way official, whether they're real or not. Since there was no intent to defraud, even signing a dead man's name is not illegal. At the very, very worst, CBS News might have committed libel, but the standard for libel is very strict, and such a claim probably would not hold up in court.
it's not, poverty is
That's the most ignorant statement I've heard all day. That's like saying that darkness is a threat.
Poverty is nothing more or less than the relative condition caused by the absence of wealth. We draw an arbitrary line and say that people with less than X wealth are living in poverty while people with more than X wealth are not.
What you really mean here, what you're really talking about, is not poverty but rather inequity. You're one of those "let's make everyone equal" nutcases who thinks that communism is actually a pretty good idea that was never implemented correctly.
Attempts to understand the root causes of support for radicalism
Attempting to understand the root causes of terrorism does one thing and one thing only: it guarantees, with absolute certainty, that the next guy who has a beef is going to blow up a building to get attention.
Stop bombing people into the ground and it just might not happen to you.
"Just might not" isn't good enough. If we continue bombing everybody who supports terrorism back into the stone age, eventually folks will get the message that terrorism is a bad idea all around.
It is about putting peace before closing your eyes to world suffering.
La la, sunshine, lollypops and rainbows. What a fucking tool.
The UN is an institution based on democratic principles.
No, it's not. It is, in fact, completely indifferent toward democratic principles. none of the representatives to the UN are elected by the people they represent. They are appointed, many by governments that we would not consider to be legitimate much less wholly democratic.
Mostly it is a symptom of living in a large mostly urban country.
More than 200,000,000 Americans live in places --towns, villages, unincorporated areas --with populations of less than 50,000.
If you mean "urban" as in "something other than subsistence farming," then you're right. But if you mean "urban" as in "the upper west side," you're mistaken.
NERDS!
facist
You broke the gauge on my dipshit meter. I expect you to pay for the repairs. Where shall I send the bill?
you can't disprove what witness say
No witnesses have said that Lt. Bush was given an order. That story comes solely from a document, a document which has been demonstrated conclusively to be a forgery.
Nobody ever disputed that Bush skipped his last flight physical and that he let his flight status lapse. That was old news in 1994, 1998 and 2000. What's disputed is that Bush disobeyed a direct order. And that's a claim that comes only from this document, this forged document.
You lost any crediblity when you said people were being treated nice at Guantanamo.
Been there lately? No? Then shut the fuck up, okay? Okay.
Not that you can prove that.
LOL. Typical crazy-person thinking. Orders are documented, okay? Where's the documentation of this order? It's not a memo created last July in Microsoft Word, I can tell you that for damn sure.
No documentation, no order. Simple.
I think the mere fact that there exists an entire Web site dedicated to providing documentation for the product testifies to what a lousy product it is.
Twirlip of the Mists has strongly implied the documents are forgeries
I'm not implying it. After three days of research, I'm saying it outright. These memos are forgeries, and inept ones at that.
despite the CBS experts
Actually CBS has only produced one expert, and all he talked about was the signature, and all he said was that it wasn't obviously forged.
Which is, of course, irrelevant. Given two minutes and a copy of Photoshop, anybody can put any signature on any document.
despite the contradictory statements here and elsewhere
"Nuh uh" is not a contradictory statement.
despite living persons saying the alleged author of these documents had said these concerns to others
MG Hodges didn't say that. CBS said he said that, but upon hearing his words misrepresented, he recanted. He was read the memos over the phone (he never saw them) and said, "If that's what Jerry Killian wrote, that must be what he felt."
of course I'm not even going to listen to anyone else
You weren't listening to anyone before, you shithead. What's the difference.
Times New Roman is a clone of Times Roman carefully designed to have identical metrics as Times Roman.
Apparently false. Scroll down to the part where the author talks about all the different varieties of Times New Roman.
Um... you might want to look up the IBM Selectric Composer.
Funny you should mention that. On the exact same site, a guy (a reporter, evidently, or maybe just a really determined blogger) found somebody with the only known working Selectric Composer in North America. They tested it to see if it could produce these memos. Turns out it couldn't. And they've got lots of documentation explaining why.
Also, the Composer wasn't a typewriter at all. It was a typesetting machine. Completely different.
The Executive's default font is a wide-bowl serif font that doesn't resemble Times. But IBM sold a number of optional fonts for the Executive.
None of which was Times New Roman, ya putz.
LOL. Good one. Spit Dan Rather's dick out and go see what real reporters are doing. You know, the kind who go find out things and tell you about them, instead of just making shit up?
Seing as the person who was the recipient says that he was told things like this by the person who reportedly wrote this memo, what more do you really need?
We need to know why these memos are forgeries.
We'd also like to know why MG Hodges stopped answering his phone. He hasn't picked up all day.
Cite? Cite? Cite?
Bored now. Moving on. Check out my story in the Post if you want your head to spin some more.
Where on earth did you get a cost figure of 20k$ for a Selectric?
The IBM Selectric was a different machine. The IBM Selectric Composer was a cold-type typesetting machine that sold new from IBM for about $20,000.
Gee, now, why would the 111th want a th ball? How silly of a concept.
For starters, because they weren't the "111th." They were the "111TH." Air Force style calls for the unit designation to be in all caps in all official documents and correspondence. The 111th would never need to refer to itself except in all caps.
False and false. The Selectric Composer and Selectric Executive both could.
Okay, you're diverging wildly from the truth here.
1. The Selectric Composer was not a typewriter; it was a typesetter. It did proportional letterspacing but it did not have a Times New Roman type ball. The closest it has was Press Roman, a distinctly different face.
2. There was never any such thing as a "Selectric Executive." You're talking about the IBM Executive, maybe? It did proportional spacing but did not have interchangeable type balls. The output of an IBM Executive more closely resembled Century than it did Times. The two could not be confused. Also, the Executive could not type a superscript "th."
Where did you get that? You type it once, and then you tell the typewriter to print it (sort of like a word processor), at least judging from a cursory read of the manual.
Try a more-than-cursory read. The Selectric Composer was an entirely mechanical device with no electronics in it at all. It had no memory. To set a line of type, you typed the line with the ball disengaged and read the spacing numbers off of the colored indicator. Then you returned the carrier head to the beginning of the line and manually set the spacing wheel, then you retyped the line. Very time-consuming, and it required special training to use.
I'll disagree, and more importantly, the handwriting experts hired by CBS disagree.
CBS has yet to produce any evidence supporting their assertion that either a handwriting expert or a document analyst looked at these memos. Other experts have gone on the record as saying that these documents are most likely forgeries. See today's article in the Post or the one in the Sun Times.
This memo isn't related to Barnes. Barnes's statements are old news; he testified as much in a deposition a decade ago, and it wasn't contested then.
Barnes said that the Bush family or a friend of the Bush family (his story changed halfway through) used influence to get special treatment for George W. Bush. There was no evidence of this allegation, and it was debunked by everybody from the New York Times to the AP to the Houston Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times. His statement was hardly "not contested."
These memos serve two purposes, politically speaking. One of the indicates that 1LT George W. Bush was ordered to undergo a flight exam two months early, an allegation that is not supported anywhere else and that, now, is not believed. The other purpose is to back up Barnes' story of improper influence. But, again, that story is now not believed because the only documentary evidence to support it is a forgery.