... and he's a Bushie shill. Big surprise. Writes Peter Wallsten of the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's National Guard service — a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.

But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.

Of course, some of us who (ahem!) are experts in typography knew he was blowing smoke as soon as he said the originals might have been set in Palatino -- Times New Roman, maybe, but not Palatino -- but let's continue ...

 

This whole sorry episode began on the evening of September 8, when a lawyer named Harry MacDougald, posting anonymously as "Buckhead," wrote on Free Republic that the memos were forgeries created by computer word processing or possibly by typesetting equipment but not on typewriters available in 1972. By the following morning this assertion had been picked up by a number of right-wing blogs. It hit Drudge mid-afternoon, was on Fox News by early evening, and was all over mass media in time for the 10 o'clock news 

 

In other words, the unsupported opinion of one anonymous man traveled from a radically extremist web site to all of mass media and became cemented as conventional wisdom in less than 24 hours.

 

Note that most of the same people who ridiculed Dan Rather because he wasn't more careful about the memos accepted "Buckhead's" claims at face value. We may yet learn that the memos were forged, but this cannot be determined with certainty without the originals.

 

People all over the web who hitherto didn't know a ligature from a serif are suddenly "experts" who hang great significance on the exact placement of a superscript or the fact that words on the PDF file can be made to align with the same words created with word processing. Although when I tried it, it turned out like this:

 

The above doesn't prove anything. Clearly, the red letters (word processing) are a tiny bit larger than the black letters (from the CBS scans). But without the originals, we don't know if the scans are true to size (I suspect they are not), which is why all the animated GIFs that have been created to show perfect alignment don't prove anything, either. 

 

On the other hand, because of the extreme degradation of the characters themselves I suspect there's enough distortion in the CBS scans that they may no longer align perfectly with their own originals. If the originals still exist and someday come to light, expect someone to claim they aren't the real originals because they don't line up perfectly with the scans.

 

And, once again, typewriters did exist in 1972 that could have typed the originals. They were the more expensive models, but they did exist. 

 

That being said, there are enough questions about the provenance of the  memos that I agree they should be questioned and investigated. If the originals turn up and it turns out they were forged, I promise to announce this on The Mahablog in 52 point Helvetica.

 

Until then, assume nothing.

 

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Federal and state authorities have narrowed their investigation to a single person of interest, according to Glen Whorton, assistant director for the Nevada Corrections Department.

Whorton said on Saturday it does not appear that any of the letters contained any writings, only a blank sheet with a match or match head rigged to ignite when the paper was opened. [Link]

The catch is that the terrorist appears to be local talent, possibly a white supremacist/Aryan Brotherhood associate. Therefore, no one cares. Only Middle Eastern terrorists are worthy of concern these days.

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The next time someone tries to tell you that nobody but fundamentalist Christians, corporate CEOS, and neoconservative ideologues support George Bush’s election as president, you tell them that’s not fair.  Terrorists do too.  Here’s a statement from Abu Hafs al-Masri, the Islamic militants who claimed “credit” for the Madrid train bombings, in support of Bush’s election campaign:

"We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," it said.

Addressing Bush, it said: "We know that a heavyweight operation would destroy your government, and this is what we don't want. We are not going to find a bigger idiot than you." The statement said Abu Hafs al-Masri needs what it called Bush's "idiocy and religious fanaticism" because they would "wake up" the Islamic world. Comparing Bush with his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, the statement tells the president, "Actually, there is no difference between you and Kerry, but Kerry will kill our community, while it is unaware, because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish infidelity and present it to the Arab and Islamic community as civilization."

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We're watching the biggest jujitsu flip ever seen in American politics. President Bush, a slacker, a draft evader, a failure in business, a man so devoid of world curiosity that he rarely left America's shores (even checked "no overseas service" on his Air National Guard application) and a president who has misled the American people about everything from the invasion of Iraq to the cost of Medicare, has managed to flip John Kerry onto his back by turning Kerry's strengths -- his valor in Vietnam, his intellect, his expanded worldview and, yes, his nuanced thinking -- against him. In jujitsu that's how it's meant to be. In politics it's cynical and destructive -- and shamefully effective.

Lenfestey makes some great points -- me sure to read the whole thing.

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George W. Bush is now trapped as tightly in Iraq as Johnson was in Vietnam. The war is going badly. The president's own intelligence estimates are pessimistic. There is no plan to actually win the war in Iraq, and no willingness to concede defeat. [Bob Herbert, 9/17]

There are great many elements of the Middle East Mega-crisis that are outside U.S. control. Senator Kerry might be able to tell us what he wants to do, or how he hopes an exit strategy will work out, but I think it's safe to say that no honest person can promise anything.

But the first step to solving any problem is to recognize that there's a problem. The second step is to thoroughly understand the nature of the problem. And the third step is to formulate a solution that doesn't cause worse problems. In the past three years, Bush has demonstrated he can't do any of these things.

But Kerry has made great progress with steps one and two. For this reason, I trust him to be better able than Bush to go on to step three. And so far, I've been right.

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Even if they are genuine, the documents don't add much to what is known. While some of the details remain uncertain, it is clear that during the Vietnam War, President Bush took advantage of his family connections to obtain a slot in the Texas Air National Guard, became certified as a jet pilot, later missed a number of meetings and other obligations, lost his National Guard pilot's license, and was honorably discharged.

With Senator John Kerry, while some details are also in dispute, abundant documentation makes it clear that Kerry volunteered for hazardous duty in Vietnam, returned after an abbreviated tour in which he was wounded three times, and performed with true heroism twice, earning the Silver Star and Bronze Star he was awarded. [Boston Globe, 9/17]

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The telephone polls do not include cellular phones. There are almost 169 million cell phones being used in America today - 168,900,019 as of Sept. 15, according to the cell phone institute in Washington.

There is no way to poll cell phone users, so it isn't done.

Zogby points out that you don't know in which area code the cell phone user lives. Nor do you know what they do. Beyond that, you miss younger people who live on cell phones. If you do a political poll on land-line phones, you miss those from 18 to 25, and there are figures all over the place that show there are 40 million between the ages of 18 and 29, one in five eligible voters.

Make of that what you will. Zogby says he does not use telephone polls, and last week (September 8 and 9) he had Bush just two points up, with a three point margin of error.

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush's approval rating declined to 44 percent from 56 percent among undecided voters since the Republican National Convention, a poll by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found.

Immediately after the Republican convention in New York, several polls showed Mr. Bush jumping ahead of Mr. Kerry with a clear lead of between six and 11 percentage points. There's no such 'convention bounce' for the president in the latest poll by Harris.

The Harris poll, conducted by telephone Sept. 9-13, shows Sen. Kerry leading Mr. Bush 48% to 47% among likely voters nationwide. The poll also found that a slender 51% to 45% majority doesn't believe that Mr. Bush deserves to be re-elected.

The previous poll in which likely U.S. voters were asked which candidate they preferred showed Messrs. Kerry and Bush tied 47% to 47%. That survey was conducted before the Republican National Convention in New York City, which ended earlier this month. An earlier poll in June indicated a Bush lead over Mr. Kerry of 10 percentage points, at 51% to 41%.

The latest poll was conducted within the U. S. among a nationwide cross section of 1,018 adults. It has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

The results echo a recent poll sponsored by Investor's Business Daily, which also showed that the gap between the U.S. presidential candidates has disappeared. The poll of likely voters showed the two candidates tied at 47% in a two-man race and tied at 46% if independent candidate Ralph Nader is included.

Who are these people? They obviously have the time to find my e-mail address but lack the courtesy to inquire whether I am the person they heard about on television. They are unhappy about what they saw. But how does that get them to the conclusion that I am a ''liar,'' the ''biggest dirty trickster since Watergate'' and ``a paid agent of George Soros''?

My e-mailers apparently think that the folks at 60 Minutes were sloppy in checking the facts about Bush's service in the National Guard. Where do they get their facts? How can they be utterly oblivious to their own inability to discover the simplest facts about me? ...

...Have we become so polarized and partisan that no one any longer cares about the truthfulness of what is said in a political campaign? Could it be that dirty tricks that used to involve whispered rumors are now done more openly and more nationally on the web and in television advertising bought with unregulated money?

Or is it something about the Internet? It used to be that only leaders could be demagogues. They were the only ones with access to mass communication, which allowed them to manipulate popular prejudices in pursuit of power. Now fast computers and the World Wide Web have democratized demagogy. Today anyone can sit at his or her terminal, spew hatred, issue false accusations and become a virtual Sen. Joe McCarthy. On both sides of the political spectrum, that is exactly what some people are doing.

Last week, they found my e-mail address.

She said she did not recall typing the memos reported by CBS News, though she said they accurately reflect the viewpoints of Lt. Col. Killian and documents that would have been in the personal file. Also, she could not say whether the CBS documents corresponded memo for memo with that file.

“The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones,” she said.

Mrs. Cox also remembers having a mechanical Olympia typewriter with a raised "th" charadcter in those years, proof that all kinds of things like that existed. These memos were not typed on a mechanical typewriter, however.

I like this part --

She said that the culture of the time was that men didn’t type office-related documents, and she expressed doubt that Lt. Col. Killian would have typed the memos. She said she would typically type his memos from his handwritten notes, which she would then destroy.

When I wrote on Friday that men did not type in those years and that a clerk had typed the memos for Killian, a flaming idiot named Chris Nath (see comment #2) wrote,

Oh my God. You’ve never served in the military, have you? Of all the asinine rationalizations I’ve read regarding these documents, this one takes the cake. You honestly believe what your wrote here, don’t you? I’m not saying that the wingnuts falling over themselves are not without fault, but give me a break.

Once again, I am proved correct. But let's continue ... What's important is the content of the letters, and Mrs. Cox verifies the content. And if the typing isn't hers, perhaps Mrs. Cox was on vacation or ill, and Killian borrowed a clerk from elsewhere to fill in. That seems to me more probable than someone's retyping them later, as Mrs. Cox suggests, although anything is possible.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A business school professor who taught George W. Bush at Harvard University in the early 1970s says the future president told him that family friends had pulled strings to get him into the Texas Air National Guard.

Yoshi Tsurumi, in his first on-camera interview on the subject, told CNN that Bush confided in him during an after-class hallway conversation during the 1973-74 school year.

"He admitted to me that to avoid the Vietnam draft, he had his dad -- he said 'Dad's friends' -- skip him through the long waiting list to get him into the Texas National Guard," Tsurumi said. "He thought that was a smart thing to do."

I can't blame Bush for pulling strings to get into the Guard. I had a built-in deferment, so I didn't have to face the draft. I can't say I wouldn't have pulled strings, too, assuming I had any.  A man of character would have fulfilled his obligations, however.

This was the first time, some said, that the Web logs were engaging in their own form of investigative journalism — and readers, they warned, should be cautious.

"The mainstream press is having to follow them," said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?

"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"

... through some gradual process of cultural mummification, the attacks of three years ago have become a symbol, a cluster of stuffed and mounted official images, and as such they must now compete with fresher images for the country's interest and attention.

Though most out-of-towners don't realize it, New Yorkers don't visit Ground Zero very often. On the contrary, many have avoided going near the site — and they have dim opinions of the crowds that congregate there.

I didn't notice this until a Toronto friend asked me when I'd last visited Ground Zero, and I realized that I'd never once purposely gone to look at it. It wasn't until this summer that I ran into the site, accidentally, while shopping nearby.

On the first anniversary of 9/11 I went to a mosque in Chicago and found a smaller repeat of what had happened for three nights after the attacks, when thousands of whites had rallied near this building in the suburb of Bridgeview. This time, vehicles sprouting giant US flags raced down Harlem Avenue. There were horns and peeling rubber. Two bare-chested men had flags painted neck-to-navel on their bodies. Hundreds of flag-waving white people roared in unison, "USA! USA!"

The next time it [the picture of her husband's fire truck] came into her life was in March of last year when the sanitation man, a good man, who always talked about the picture and who had been carefully putting the garbage cans back to the side of the house, now came charging to the door.

"Congratulations! You ought to be excited."

"Why?" she remembers saying.

"Because they're going in to get even for you. You'll have revenge." The United States had invaded Iraq.

"I don't want revenge. I don't think this country should have revenge." She remembers him looking at her as if she were demented.

"When they read the names, they should read the names of the thousand soldiers who got killed in Iraq, too," she was saying on Friday morning.