A question that's been bouncing around the more political areas of the blogosphere is "were those memos that 60 Minutes showed about Bush receiving special treatment during his service faked or not?".
It seems that the proportional spacing of the type (in which skinnier letters like "i" get let space than wide letters like "m" or "w", common in the era of today's computers and printers, but rare in the days of the typewriter) and the superscripted "th" in the word "187th" suggest that the memos weren't typed on a typewriter in 1973, but in Microsoft Word in 2004 and then photocopied repeatedly to produce the effect of age.
Here's a graphic that morphs the purported 1973 memo and a version created in Word. It is eerily similar.
As much as I disagree with the Bush Camp in general, I disagree with cheesy tactics like this (if these memos turn out to be forgeries) even more. There's enough truth to nail the Bush administration without having to resort to "noble lies" in the Straussian (Leo, not Gideon) tradition. Even my rather-quite-to-the-right-of-me friend David Janes, a Bushie, will readily admit that he considers Bush a dud on most issues; he only agrees with the war footing.
It's interesting to note that this is a "We Media" moment coming from the right-wing side of the blogosphere. Most of the "blogs as journalism" reports tend to come from the left-leaning sectors.
More on this "man bites dog" stuff at Ace of Spades HQ.
David points to this funny comic on the whole forgery kerfuffle:
Office phone:
Google Talk:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603
Bottomline... MS Word should make docs look like that... it was designed with fonts that are supposed to make docs look like they were typed on typewriters... that was the whole point.
a) not having to face the fact that Bush, who ran from actual combat, has no qualms about sending Americans into war (well, except not his kids) for a constantly shifting rationale, and
b) trying to make his opponent look bad, because quite frankly Bush can't run on anything of substance that he did that benefited the majority of Americans.
Now, if only he would've cleared brush from *their* ranches, they might have a decent reason to vote for him.
Anyways, I promise that this will be my last post on politics here. I come here for cheap porn references and paens to PHP, not politics. Apologies in advance. Thanks for the heads up on cooking for Engineers - I always order Tiramisu if it's on the menu, just to see if it's better than the one I make.
As for this blog, it's on whatever's interesting me at the time, whether it's politics, PHP or sly references to all those cities whose names begin with the letter "D" that Debbie did.