| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
11 Sep 2004 02:56:59 AM |
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# AWOL Documents: Right Wing Media DEBUNKED |
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040911Peralta.shtml
Bush's Guard Service and the Right Wing's 60 Minutes Mythology
by Salvador Peralta
published by The Progressive Trail
Bush's Guard Service and the Right Wing's 60 Minutes Mythology
On Wednesday of this week, CBS's 60 Minutes aired a segment which shed
some light on President Bush's failure to fulfill his military
obligations to the Texas Air National Guard. 60 Minutes Later, the
Right Wing punditry started to respond...
The documentation that 60 Minutes used as the basis for their story
included the following:
A memo ordering Bush to take a physical
A memo discussing "options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill
from now through November." And that due to other commitments "he may
not have time."
A document suspending Bush for "failure to perform to U.S. Air
Force/Texas Air National Guard standards and for failure to take his
annual physical as ordered."
A memo from Bush's squadron commander where "he is being pressured by
higher-ups to give the young pilot a favorable yearly evaluation; to,
in effect, sugarcoat his review. He refuses, saying, 'I'm having
trouble running interference and doing my job.'"
Within hours of the airing of the 60 Minutes segment, a user named
"Buckhead" posted to the FreeRepublic.com web site asserting that
proportionally-spaced fonts were not common in 1972, and that the 60
Minutes story was a forgery.
This post was picked up on the blog LittleGreenFootballs.com, and went
from there to the CyberSpace News Service where it spread via the
drudgereport from whence it was sucked into the right wing press
outlets such as Fox news and the Weekly Standard as gospel before
finally making it's finally into the mainstream media including the
AP, LA Times, and Washington Post.
Holding aside the journalistic credibility of the original sources for
this story, "littegreenfootballs.com" and "Buckhead", a cursory glance
at the facts of the matter show that the entire right wing line is
built on a foundation of decepton. The general line of the right wing
attack machine is as follows:
Don't deny the story outright. Just raise the possibility that the
documents *might* be faked. This gives partisans something to latch
onto and a talking point to start regurgitating in the right wing
press. Repeat the lie often enough and some people will regard it as
the truth.
Of course, that only works if people don't take the time to debunk the
lies. So with that in mind, let's deconstruct the four major planks of
the right wing's attack on the 60 Minutes Story:
1. Times New Roman Fonts did not exist in 1972
The Times New Roman font was developed in 1931 by Stanley Morison,
Typographical Advisor to the Monotype Corporation who adapted the font
to the IBM selectric Typewriter in 1947.
2. Documents back then didn't have superscripted 'th' characters
Superscripted fonts appear on other documents in Bush's flight school
record, and had been available on IBM electric typewriters since 1947.
3. The document used proportional spacing which was not available in
1972
Proportional spacing had been available on typewriters since 1941.
Press advertisements dating back to 1952 and 1953 suggest that the
feature was widely available, and was even used on Richard Nixon's
resignation letter in 1974.
4. The document used curlycue apostrophes which did not exist on
typewriters in 1972.
Print advertisements for the IBM Exectuive typewriter show that
curlycue apostrophes were used as early as 1953.
Proof that the air force was using typewriters capable of producing
documents as early as 1966 can be found here.
The story is a cautionary tale about the effectiveness of the right
wing smear machine at obfuscating facts and using outright lies to
manipulate the public and to punish those who attempt to hold
President Bush accountable for his actions.
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| User: "SpacemanSpiff" |
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| Title: Re: # AWOL Documents: Right Wing Media DEBUNKED |
11 Sep 2004 12:03:39 PM |
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CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo
September 12, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS'
''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans'
allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of
his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he
said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward
fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because
it does not meet basic standards.''
Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic
standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60
Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of
some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush
failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had
been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly
''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get
him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.
Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of
the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the
''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo
conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written
to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one
producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets
who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera --
that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one
thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a
handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign
operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out
there right away.
The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National
Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973
using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of
Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that
automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973
typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them
a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny,
and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique
typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for
his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other
than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s
and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner)
until the 1980s.
Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic
Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and
his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we
have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's
fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy
who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP.
It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles
Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the
eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent
the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter
identification experts.
Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax,
Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails:
''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of
sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the
frequency, Kenneth?' "
Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the
Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator,
''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when
the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did
not match up with other documents available on the public record, but
producers chose to move ahead with the story.''
Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good
enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the
Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages
because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul
Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column
called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was
about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake
memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story
demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that
he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."
The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the
memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy
August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the
Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present
war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man
who can never win.
After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about
'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is
conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''
The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land.
Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this
Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet
story's going nowhere.''
George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the
media aren't on his side.
Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem
is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications
had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times
of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor,
Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to
editor emeritus.''
''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus'
means.''
''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means
you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.
I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather
to editor emeritus.
Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting
Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better
fact-checking.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast,
rewritten, or redistributed.
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