It's getting a little too easy to get bogged down with the small details of how this crude forgery was created. Keep in mind the big picture, and if friends or family members ask you what you know about this scandal, avoid discussing font faces and superscript and just point them to this:

That's Little Green Footballs' alternation between the "document typed on typewriter in 1972" and the same text in MS Word 97 in that system's default font, printed out four or five days ago now.

.gif taken from Best of the Web Today.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (7)
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Microsoft Forger promises to take all the tedium and confusion out of drafting first-class political hoaxes.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (10)
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Fresh Air comes up with a terrific catch. I will now post it and take all the credit and glory.

"Interesting article I located. It appears the Boston Globe mistakenly said Staudt retired in 1975 during a story about the 1988 presidential race, in which Lloyd Bentsen's son was accused of using his connections to get into the TANG."
--Fresh Air

BENTSEN'S SON GIVEN TIP ABOUT GUARD JOB

Copyright Boston Globe Newspaper Aug 20, 1988

NEW ORLEANS - The only son of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen Jr., the Democratic vice presidential candidate, was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard in 1968 as a financial officer after being told of a rare opening by the unit's top officer, the Dukakis campaign said yesterday.

Responding to a reporter's inquiry, Marilyn Yaeger, communications director for Bentsen's campaign, said Lloyd Bentsen 3d was told of the opening by Lt. Col. Walter Staudt, commander of the Texas Air National Guard at the time.

The two men met at a party in 1968 at about the time Bentsen was graduating from Stanford University with a master's degree in business administration.

Bentsen, who had been turned down previously for a pilot's position in the Guard because of colorblindness, told Staudt that he was still interested in joining the Guard in some other capacity, Yaeger said.

"Staudt told Bentsen that he just happened to have an opening in his accounting division and suggested he apply," Yaeger said.

...

Staudt retired from the Guard in 1975. Bentsen was campaigning for his father yesterday in Texas. Neither he nor Staudt could be reached for comment.

&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=8/20/1988%20to%208/20/1988&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date &xcal_useweights=no">LINK to archived (i.e., you need to pay) article here.

Fresh Air again: "Burkett probably just relied upon news stories and never actually checked to find out when Staudt retired."

Unbelievable, and most likely a bullseye! Casting about for a good heavy to blame the pulling-strings part of his "documents" upon, the forger came across (or previously knew of) Staudt, previously implicated in pulling strings for Lloyd Bentsen's son in 1968.

He relied upon The Boston Globe to get the date of Staudt's retirement correct-- and, of course, relying on The Boston Globe for anything at all will most likely bite you in your ass.

Hard.

Sweet irony! The forger is undone by his own reliance upon the liberal hacks at the Boston Globe, one of the two groups of liberal hacks most desperately pushing these forgeries in the first place!

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (15)
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According to this American Spectator piece, they're not quite as convinced of the documents' authenticity as Dan Rather would have his audience believe:

On Friday, according to CBS News sources, Rather spent the day on the phone and dealing with CBS suits who were nervous about the fall out from the story. "All Dan could say was that this was an attack from the right-wing nuts, and that we should have expected this, given the stakes," says a CBS News producer. "He was terribly defensive and nervous. You could tell."

All day Friday, Rather, his producer on the story, Mary Mapes, and other 60 Minutes staffers were scrambling to shore up support from their sources on the story. That effort didn't go so well. By Saturday, one of their key sources, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, had said that CBS misled him, and that he had never been shown the memos in question.

"We pulled the trick of only calling some sources at the last minute to reconfirm," says the CBS producer. "Someone called Hodges, I think, on Monday night and read him parts of the document. The late contacts are a standard practice so we don't tip off the competition or our sources."

...

PERHAPS MOST TROUBLING to the CBS News staff looking into how its story went off the rails is the timing of the memos' appearance. "Some 60 Minutes staffers have been working on this story for more than three years off and on," says the CBS News producer. "There have been rumors about these memos and what was in them for at least that long. No one had been able to find anything. Not a single piece of paper. But we know that a lot of people here interviewed a lot of people in Texas and elsewhere and asked very explicit questions about the existence of these memos. Then all of a sudden they show up? In one nice, neat package?"

This CBS New producer went on to explain that the questions 60 Minutes folk were asking were specific enough that people would have been able to fabricate the memorandums to meet the exact specifications the investigative journalists were looking for. "People were asking questions of sources like, 'Have you ever seen or heard of a memo that suspended Bush for failing to appear for a physical?' and 'Have you heard about or know of someone who has any documentation from back in the 1970s that shows there was pressure to get Bush into the National Guard?' It was like they were placing an order for a ready-made product. That is the biggest problem I have with this. It's all too neat and perfect for what we needed. Without these exact pieces of paper, we don't have a story. Dan has as much as admitted that. Everyone knows it. We were at a standstill on this story until these memos showed up."

The article also states that people at CBS are floating rumors that the actual documents were hand-written, but that someone "typed them up" to make them look "more official."

This is absurd. Handwritten documents are nearly self-authenticating, and no one would commit fraud to make a more-authentic original look like a less-authentic copy.

This ridiculous "Plan B" defense, however, is similar to what I expect we will soon be hearing: Someone really saw these documents, and they said almost exactly what the forgeries say, only the witness in question didn't take the documents or make copies of them.

Therefore, to get out "the truth" which he cannot unfortunately prove with documentary evidence, he typed up what he knew was in the documents (working from a nearly perfect memory).

I don't even think our liberal Spirit Squad media would dare run with such a "forgery-but-nevertheless-accurate" defense, but I was shocked by Dan Rather's blazingly dishonest performance on Friday; before this is over, I expect to be shocked three or four more times.

Does that defense sound too ridiculous?

Is it any more ridiculous than what you've heard so far?

Is it any more ridiculous than trained reporters at CBS beginning to spin tales about real handwritten documents being "typed up" to look pretty for TV?

They are in trouble and they almost know it. When you get to this level of desperation, you begin spinning pleasing but absurd "what-if" scenarios that will get you out of the jam.

But they won't get out of this jam. This will not stand.

Posted by: Ace at 09:52 AM | Comments (16)
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An interesting, but not necessarily dispositive, question has been posed in the comments.

Jag writes:

The Oxford English dictionary cites the first use of the word 'feedback' in a non-scientific context in 1971, in a rock magazine.

... Can Killian's widow or son comment on his use of that term before he died in the early 80s?

My recollection is that "feedback" didn't gain popular usage until the advent of the technological era...the late 80s at the earliest....

[He wrote "did gain popular usage," but I corrected it, as he plainly intended "didn't."]

BR notes:

Hm, I see it there in the 18 Aug 73 forgery, the word "feedback." Are there any military commenters who would know if that was a regular service term then? I recall it in the context of Jimmy Hendrix's amplified guitar feedback, but not in the context of office administration. Wow, we could have a joint army of millions of us searching "the stylometrics way" - putting a new twist on an old method, using the internet.

I don't know, obviously. Do any informed parties care to comment?

I don't know how fruitful this would end up being either way because Jag already tells us that the OED has a 1971 citation of a non-scientific use of the term feedback. It could be that Killian was just an early adopter of the phrase before it gained wider currency. So, at best, we could probably only say that it would be unlikely that Killian would use the term, but that's hardly going to convince the likes of Dan Rather.

It seems more interesting that "distributed intelligence" can quickly spot and resolve such issues.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (15)
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It's a general admonition, but specifically don't put up people's phone numbers or personal email addresses.

We have the goods on Dan Rather and we don't need to resort to harassment.

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (1)
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Don't worry, I'll get around to Rathergate shortly.

Posted by: Ace at 05:29 AM | Comments (3)
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Once you've successfully retreived your jaw from your lap, you may proceed to risk yourself to further cognitive dissonance:

CONSERVATIVE pundits routinely accuse the news media of injecting a liberal bias into coverage of issues from abortion to gun control to gay marriage.

Now, two months before the presidential election, the economy has been invited to the culture wars. In a new paper, Kevin A. Hassett and John R. Lott Jr., economists at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization in Washington, say they have discovered that economic reporters commit the same archetypal sin: slanting the news unequivocally in favor of the Democrats.

How can a nugget of news like the economy's addition of 308,000 new jobs in March - the biggest monthly gain in about four years - yield a report that The Associated Press labeled "Bond prices tumble on jobs data"? Bias, the researchers suspected.

The two economists combed through 389 newspapers and A.P. reports contained in the LexisNexis database from January 1991 through May 2004, during the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They picked out headlines about gross domestic product growth, unemployment, retail sales and orders of durable goods and classified the headlines' depiction of the economy as either positive, negative, neutral or mixed. Then they crunched some numbers.

They found that Mr. Clinton received better headlines than the two Republican presidents. Even after adjusting the data to compensate for differences in economic performance under the three presidents, the Republicans received 20 to 30 percent fewer positive headlines, on average, for the same type of news, they concluded.

For instance, they said, the unemployment rate in the Clinton administration averaged 5.2 percent, only three-tenths of a percentage point less than it has under George W. Bush. But while 44 percent of Mr. Clinton's headlines on unemployment were positive, only 23 percent of President Bush's headlines on the subject have been upbeat.

They found that as a group, the nation's 10 largest newspapers and The Associated Press were even more skewed. According to the researchers, this group gave Republican administrations 20 to 40 percent fewer positive headlines than those given to Mr. Clinton, on average. Among the top 10 newspapers, they said that all except The Houston Chronicle had a pro-Democratic leaning, though the margin for error in their calculations was too large to be meaningful for most of them individually.

More at the link, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 05:17 AM | Comments (10)
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It's about one-sixth of the way down the document:

Although I have interviewed Rather and Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, and I said, well, look, who are your document experts? So they finally gave me the name of a handwriting expert in San Francisco, and I called him, and he says, I am muzzled, I can't talk, CBS has asked me not to talk to the press.

Via FreeRepublic-- again.

Posted by: Ace at 02:36 PM | Comments (11)
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Apparently Dan Rather sees nothing wrong with getting a little information from internet sources, so long as those sources are liberal, left-wing, or just plain looney.

Posted by: Ace at 02:25 PM | Comments (4)
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