Rather Dishonest
That headline isn't nearly as good as the New York Post's:
Rather Forges Ahead
It looks like a pun, but it's actually not. Rather really is "forging" ahead in the criminal meaning.
They give it Rather, but only with one barrel. I'm still waiting for the definitive Old Media double-barrel blast:
He produced a man named Marcel Matley as the document vetter.
But Matley is primarily a handwriting expert whose expertise in document evaluation has been challenged by the head of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners.
Matley spoke only about a signature and initials purported to be those of the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — "they are his signatures" — though two of the four memos are unsigned.
...
In another challenge to CBS, Killian's boss, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, told ABC News that he regards the documents as a computer "fraud," never saw them in the 1970s and didn't validate them for CBS.
Wasn't this the man whom CBS had previously claimed had "validated" the documents?
A senior CBS official had claimed to the Washington Post that Hodges had validated the documents.
Well, there you go.
During his national news broadcast, Rather claimed "partisan political operatives" are challenging the memos but omitted the fact that Killian's widow and son dispute them.
...
A key issue is whether the documents were made on a 1970s-era typewriter or are forgeries done by computer because of their proportional spacing and raised superscripts on ordinal numbers like "111th."
Rather last night pointed to an undisputed document from Bush's National Guard files and claimed it has a superscript, so they were available by 1968.
But that document is in a different typeface and experts say it was made on a different type of machine without proportional spacing so it proves nothing.
"It could be a superscript, it could be a correction with a letter showing through white-out, but in any case it's absolutely irrelevant . . . It doesn't prove a thing," said document expert Bill Flynn.
So I wasn't reaching.
...
Flynn said it's "very unlikely" that the memos are legit, adding that he knows of no typewriter fonts using proportionally spaced Roman type with a raised "th" available in the 1970s.
Rather didn't identify any machine capable of producing the documents.
I have to say I'm perplexed by the fact that no old media I know of has just posted pictures of the "document" compared to the same text written in MS Word 97 as Little Green Footballs did. Why do they repeatedly refuse to simply publish the smoking-gun evidence of the crime?
You don't need to be a document expert to see those two are identical.
LGF's Point: LGF attempts to reproduce the "document" with Apple TextEdit. He shows that even with Times New Roman font at the same size as in the "document," even a similar word-processing program creates a much-different document than the Rather "document."
We know, then, that not only was this "document" created with a computer, but it was almost certainly created specifically with MS Word 97.
It cannot be the case that Killian's "supertyperwriter" just happens to be the one device in history that perfectly duplicates MS Word 97 documents.
Except, of course, until the actual advent of MS Word 97.
Thanks to commenters for explaining that to me.
Dan Rather Retirement Update:
Dan Rather has staked his, and CBSNews', credibility on this transparent forgery. He could have simply admitted yesterday that he was conned and taken a hit to his credibility. Instead, he chose to lie to his audience, offering up the flimsiest evidence in rebuttal while deliberately suppressing telling his audience about the strongest evidence of forgeries.
This will not stand.
At the tone, the Dan Rather Retirement Watch displays a time of
(bong)
11:48 PM -- four minutes closer to midnight (retirement)