Fisking Rather

Dan Rather's latest pathetic excuse for a defense of the forged memos is so absurd, so devoid of substance, that quite frankly I'm beginning to wonder if he's deliberately trying to destroy his own and his network's reputations. Perhaps he's been bought off by NBC.

I've seen this "fisking" thing before, and it looked like fun, so herewith, my fisking of Rather's latest hilarity. Source material is the rush transcript courtesy of RatherBiased.com.

Besides checking on john kerry's service record, CBS has been checking president bush's service in the national guard, including whether or not he did or did not fulfill his commitment.

Danny Boy, you haven't been "checking on" John Kerry's service record, because John Kerry hasn't released his full service record. He could do so by signing a simple form. Plenty of people in the blogosphere you so despise have been calling upon him to do so, but neither you nor your colleagues in the mainstream media have joined them.

There has also been criticism of the new documents obtained by CBS.

Some, yes.

But CBS used several techniques to make sure these papers should be taken seriously.

Did these techniques involve crystal balls and chicken guts?

Talking to handwriting and document analysts and other experts who strongly insist that the documents could have be created in the 70s.

Who? Name names. So far, the lone handwriting (not document) expert you've trotted out is on record as saying that it's impossible to definitively authenticate a photocopy. But it is possible to definitively refute a photocopy, which has been done a hundred times over.

And by the way, "could have been created" is not the same thing as "were created." Not that it matters, of course, since they couldn't have been created in the 1970s.

Everything in those documents that people are saying can't be done, as you said, 32 years ago, is totally false. Not true. Like I said, proportion al spacing was available, super scripts was available as a custom feature. Proportional spacing between lines was available. You could order it any way you like.

Proportional spacing, perhaps. Proportional spacing at the same fine-grained level as modern computerized typesetting? Never. If you believe what you're writing, Dan, why have you not attempted to collect the $37,900 reward offered by DefeatJohnJohn.com for anyone who can produce a machine reasonably capable of reproducing the memos in the 1970s?

Richard katz, a software designer found other indications in the documents.

Richard who?? Is this the Richard Katz, software designer, on whom you're hanging your case? What, if anything, qualifies him over the half-dozen or more bona fide experts who've refuted you?

He noticed the lower case l is used in documents instead of the actual numeral one. That would be difficult to reproduce on the computer today.

Difficult to reproduce? How hard is it to type a lowercase L rather than a numeral 1?

Turn it around, Dan. Why on Earth would a typist, using an ultra-modern (for the time) sophisticated piece of typesetting equipment, replace a 1 with an L? There's a reason... but we'll get to that.

If you were doing this a week ago or a month ago on a normal laser jet printer, it wouldn't work. The font wouldn't be available to you.

Hogwash. This has been done, not a week ago, but a day ago. It works fine.

Katz noted the documents have the superscript th and a regular sized th. That would be common on a typewriter, not a computer.

I have no idea why he's even asserting this.

Richard Katz: There is one document from may of 1972 which contains a normal al th at the top. To produce that in microsoft word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the th setting off or back over them and type them again.

Actually, no, there are several ways to produce it. I can think of at least three.

One way, for example, is to use a lowercase L rather than a 1. The forged memos exhibit this behavior: the inept forger used an L rather than a 1 in order to prevent Word's AutoCorrect feature from superscripting the little th. There is no reason for a typist using a typewriter to make this substitution, while there's plenty of reason for a forger on a word processor to do it.

Another way is to insert a space between the number and the th, as in "111 th." The documents do this, too. It looks very bad. No experienced typist would do this, especially not one who's willing to swap out type balls and adjust escapement to produce a superscripted th elsewhere. But again, an inept forger, one who wasn't aware of how to avoid AutoCorrect, might do it.

And a third way is to press Control-Z, or select Edit/Undo from the menu. This undoes the last AutoCorrection in a single keystroke. No "going out of your way" necessary.

So to summarize, CBS produced a no-name "software designer" with little in the way of credentials, and allowed him to spout utter nonsense to clear their names.

CBS news relied on an analysis of the contents of the documents themselves to determine the contents authenticity.

I can produce a memo, dated 1972, which states that Dan Rather is a wiener. The contents of the document will be absolutely authentic. The document itself will not be.

What's your game, Dan? The longer you postpone it, the bigger the crash will be.

Update: Captain Ed joins the party. Others will follow, I am certain.

Update: Assuming the Richard Katz linked above is indeed the Richard Katz cited by Rather, the top headline on his website is "President Bush thwarts WiFi, U.S. business, consumers." The article castigates Bush for "turning back" efforts to develop WiFi, comparing Bush's policy unfavorably to that of Canada and China.

A number of the honest experts who've pointed out the obvious flaws in the forgeries have stated that they oppose President Bush, but they oppose fraud even more. It'd be nice if Rather, in his hunt for "experts" to back him up, could find some who aren't Bush anti-partisans, or Kerry fundraisers, or authors of Bush-blasting books.