Category: Business

See RatherBiased.com for a comprehensive fisking of Dan Rathers’ case for the forged documents. Among other things, they cite an attempt to re-create these memos on a real Selectric Composer.

Conclusion: Rather has stepped in it big time.

Dear Mr. Matley,

I write because you’ve been identified as the expert who authenticated suspicious memos concerning President Bush for Dan Rather of CBS News. I was in the photo-typesetting business in the mid-70s, and I spent many hours examining text produced by computer printers, Selectric typewriters, Linotypes, and photo typesetters in great detail, and I found your conclusion quite astonishing.

I see from your bio available on the Internet that you’re actually a handwriting expert and not a typography expert, so I’d like to ask if your work for CBS News encompassed the typographic features of the memos in question. If it did, I’d appreciate your suggesting what make and model of output device available to the military in 1972 could have produced variable size fonts, variable line spacing, and kerning. I’m not aware of one.

Similarly, I’m curious if you attested the authenticity of the grammatical features of the memos, in terms of such things as abbreviation and punctuation? The military has well-established standards for these things, which I’m sure would be familiar to you as an expert.

Finally, we’d all appreciate knowing how much time CBS News gave you to check these documents and any other useful information you an offer.

I’m interested in getting to the truth, so I’d like to share your response on the Internet for the many, many interested parties who now have serious questions about your analysis.

Best Regards,

Richard Bennett

Marcel Matley, the expert who authenticated the forged memos for CBS News, is a handwriting expert, as you can see from this Google search. The signatures on the forged memos aren’t of any particualar interest because they’re easily cut-and-pasted.

The most damning evidence of CBS News’ forged documents is the typography, the stylistic features (abbreviations and terminology) and the utterly fantastic things we’re supposed to believe about their origins.

None of these questions were apparently addressed by Dan Rather on CBS News this evening, which leads to one and only one conclusion: Rather is stonewalling.

We all know that Selectric typewriters in the 70s were capable of doing half-line shifts up and down to make crude superscripts and subscripts, but that’s not what we’re talking about: we can see multiple type sizes, variable line spacing, and kerning in these documents, and I know for a fact that the Selectric typewriters of that era were not capable of these things.

See, I was in the typesetting business in 1975, and I spent a whole lot of time looking at documents produced by Daisy-wheel printers and all the Selectrics of the day. Our business was predicated on saving people money in printing costs by producing proportional-spaced pages from computer-resident text, and I doubt that Mr. Rather or Mr. Matley have this expertise.

The hole is getting deeper.

Dan Rather is busted, and Roger Simon calls for his resignation. How long will the stonewalling continue? It’s perfectly obvious that these documents are forgeries; any document authenticator could have seen as much from a cursory examination, yet CBS claims an unnamed outside expert vouched for them.

They’re lying.

See Donald Sensing for more on the document contents.

RatherBiased.com has the scoop on the forged documents Dan Rather used to make this case regarding the President’s National Guard service a million years ago:

During last night’s 60 Minute program on President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service, the CBS News touted a number of documents which seemingly indicate that the future president failed to meet his service obligations.

That may well be the case but it is becoming increasingly evident that 60 Minutes, and the Dan Rather, the reporter behind the story, may have been relying on forged documents to prove their case.

Several indicators point to this conclusion including the fact that the four memoranda, which Rather said were written during the early 1970s by Bush’s commanding officer Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian, are printed in a proportionally spaced type style similar to the common computer font Times New Roman. But such computer technology had not even been invented when the documents were allegedly written.

I don’t think this is an important story, but Rather’s gullibility might make it one. The election cycle is shaping up as a major indictment of the mainstream media for sloppy fact-checking and an increasingly transparent attempt to promote their favorite candidate.

Blogs for Bush has a lot more on this story.

Zell Miller’s speech at the convention was near the high point of the political season for me, as he said so many things about Sen. Flopsy that needed to be said but haven’t been said out of courtesy. Miller’s somebody that a lot of conservative Democrats and Southerners in general can relate to, because he’s a symbol of the traditional Democratic Party values that the party has abandoned – classical liberalism, muscular foreign policy, defense of liberty, and individualism.

His appearance on party hack Chris Matthews’ (he’s a former staffer to Tip O’Neill) show was lively and entertaining. He made Matthews shut up so he could answer a couple of questions without Matthews talking over him as he does to most of his guests. Matthews does this so much that I’ve quit watching his show, but I saw the clip linked from the Matthews pseudo-blog. Wonders of the Internet.

Why is Chris Matthews on TV? His network’s convention ratings are in the toilet:

Fox News — 5.2 million
NBC — 5.1 million
CBS — 4.4 million
ABC — 4.3 million
MSNBC — 1.6 million
CNN — 1.5 million

… probably because people are so tired of the spin.

OK, here’s a test: assume a male public official has sexual relations with a woman who works in his office. He then lies about it in order to keep this job, and cuts off the affair. No charges are filed.

Is the Democratic Party response to this event: A) circle the wagons to protect the man from his politicial enemies, going so far as to create entire organizations dedicated to smothering the scandal; or B) run him out of office?

It turns out the answer to this puzzle is highly situational and finely nuanced. This is what we call hypocrisy where I was raised.

Duncan “Atrios” Black raised a very interesting question on his blog Sunday:

If they’re “the same,” why are the swift boat liars on every news show and Move On people are not?

Why indeed? Moveon.org is a partisan organization funded largely by a shadowy billionaire using his influence to elect a president more sympathetic to his interests and values by running misleading ads, while SwiftVets is a partisan organization funded largely by a millionaire using his influence to re-elect a president sympathetic to his interests and values by running ads some find misleading. The SwiftVets ads are the more above-board since they rely on actual people who are willing to go on record with their complaints against Kerry, and suffer the consequences. The Moveon ads are like the Atrios blog, pseudonymous and unsupported by any verifiable claims.

But the SwiftVets ads are finally getting media attention after the “ignore it and it will go away” strategy didn’t work. It’s also interesting to note just how the MSM broke their silence on the SwiftVet charges: with long, drawn-out “investigative” pieces tracing the web of connections between the Republican Party and the SwiftVets people, as if merely voting Republican were tantamount to committing a crime.

Look, folks, it’s not a surprise that Kerry’s harshest critics are Republicans any more than it’s a surprise that the President’s are French, socialist, and anti-American; we choose sides and that’s where the sides stand right now.

In the evolution of Kerry’s Vietnam Crisis, we’re now at stage two: first they ignore you, then they attack you, then you win. The media’s reaction to the SwiftVets has cost them credibility, as has Kerry’s.

Not only was the man no hero in Vietnam, he hasn’t done anything since Vietnam that was in any way remarkable, so there’s no reason to switch horses at this point in the stream.