QandO: Quick Hits

September 10, 2004

Quick Hits
Posted by Jon Henke

I have a lot to say, but none of it requires an entire post, so....

Ignore the Lies of the Infidel Bloggers!
I have it on the highest authority that the documents are correct!
God Willing, our documents shall roast the stomachs of the pig Republicans with their Authenticity!

* The Spectator is claiming the DNC is behind the leak of these documents. I doubt this will be verifiable, and I won't speculate on the odds that a DNC staffer would leak such damning information to a right wing publication. (wait. Yes I will...they seem fairly low)

* Dean Esmay leaves a comment to a post below, writing....

It is high time the mainstream media be held to at least the minimum standards expected of competent bloggers, isn't it?

The more I think of it, the more I conclude that--in terms of the news media--the blogosphere is, essentially, another layer of editorial control. We are the Free Safety's of the news cycle, roaming at our discretion all over the newsroom and keeping the reporters in check.

And that goes for both the left and right sides of the 'sphere.

* Brad DeLong, citing a story in which Dick Cheney said "That's a source that didn't even exist 10 years ago. Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay", writes...

Cheney needs a staff who will tell him that the $2.0 billion or so in eBay's domestic revenues are already included in the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis's estimates of GDP.

Brad DeLong needs a staff who will tell him that Cheney wasn't talking about GDP. He was responding "to a question from a self-employed man who said the federal government would consider him "unemployed".

While Ebay "employment", in itself, is certainly not a major component in the Household/Establishment disparity, it is indicative of the sort of alternative "employment" situations available in a changing economy.

10 out of 10 for snappy repartee, Professor. And minus a few thousand for missing the point.

* matthew Yglesias cites the existence of proportional type in 1941, and writes...

More and more this forgeries theory is looking like just some more rightwing BS.

Yeah, it's the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: Forensic Document Specialist Division.

Is it a forgery? I have no idea. But, just as with the Swift Boat Vet story, the left side of the 'sphere seems to be engaging in some selection bias, touting the evidence that helps them, ignoring the evidence that does not, and calling "game over" at half-time.

* The New York Times editorial page is in high dudgeon. Bob Herbert is doing his best to conflate Iraq with Vietnam...

They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when he was a young man and his country was at war. They fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam, no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight a war that is unwinnable.
[...]
To what end? You can wave goodbye to the naïve idea that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East. That was never going to happen. So what are we there for, other than to establish a permanent military stronghold in the region and control the flow of Iraqi oil?

Well, Bob Herbert just doesn't seem Iraq becoming a flowering Jeffersonian democracy, so we might as well just declare defeat. And Herbert does.

I guess there's nothing in Bob Herbert's book between the Garden of Eden and Vietnam.

At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic misadventure will become politically unsustainable. Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

The constant drip-drip-drip of casualties in Iraq certainly makes it feel worse than it is--by any historical standard, that is--but what has really made the American public "balk" at the cost of the war has not been the 1000 deaths. Far from it. Prior to the war, we all assumed there would be significant loss of life. In fact, in a survey of "opinion leaders, the general public and military elite", the "acceptable losses" broke down as follows....

Opinion leaders: 29,853

General Public: 10,045

Military Elite: 6,016

In fact, it's exactly the sort of Vietnamization that Bob Herbert does that makes the American public "balk" at the war. Keep telling them they're doomed, Bob, and they're going to start to believe you.

Self-fulfilling prohecies are a great rhetorical trick, but at what cost?

* Oliver Willis is still running with the "Cheney said vote for us or die" meme, this time citing his explanation--which is perfectly clear and consistent with what he said before--and writing "Cheney tries to extricate his foot from his mouth. Nevermind, you horrible person, we know you were speaking your mind the first time. [...] Once again, the Bush administration tries to defeat facts with words."

Of course, Oliver defeats facts by ignoring words. Once again, he only presents a small portion of Cheney's statement, leaving out context. I know there's an election to win, and that supercedes, you know, intellectual honesty....but isn't that where David Brock--Oliver Willis' employer--went wrong, once upon a time?

UPDATE: I note that Instapundit, PowerLine and John Cole are have already found the Democrats tying to place the blame on Karl Rove. Their equivalent, I suppose, of "the butler did it".

"Rove Ex Machina"

UPDATE II: Kevin Drum has a very good rundown of the relevant problems with the memos, concluding....

Bottom line: these memos might be 100% genuine. But there are lots of legitimate questions about their origin and authenticity, and at a minimum CBS ought to make its own copies available for inspection and also ought to disclose the names of the typographic experts it consulted. Better yet would be convincing their source to either go public, allow inspection of the original memos, or at least allow a more thorough discussion of exactly where the documents came from.

For reference, some of the problems he notes with the memos were addressed in detail yesterday by Dale. (with graphics for you visual learners)

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Comments

Matthew is not fully convinced they're not forgeries, but it has less to do with the fonts.

However -

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I just spoke to my father who wrote three novels on Selectrics and tells me that this is wrong and it was very easy to switch the balls around and he would do it just for fun

This bit is not even worthy of being called a Red Herring. We're not talking about guys sitting around in the office in the military and (typing) "doing it just for fun" here. It's an official memo, that's supposed to be formatted in an official way.

But then I'd be shocked and surprised if the other side didn't present arguments as to why they COULD be real, that's what this should be about anyway, finding the truth, not finding the truth that works best for the side I favor.

Posted by: looker at September 10, 2004 10:55 AM

From the WaPo

CBS News released a statement yesterday standing by its reporting, saying that each of the documents "was thoroughly vetted by independent experts and we are convinced of their authenticity." The statement added that CBS reporters had verified the documents by talking to unidentified people who saw them "at the time they were written."

Yes indeed, they talked to the kids that were leaning over their friends shoulders at the time the documents were written -
a quote from one of the unnamed verifiers...
"Dude, like, it was so awesome when we found out these were going to be on Television, I mean, I was like ROFLMAO to think our stuff was going to be on TV."

Posted by: looker at September 10, 2004 11:03 AM

I keep doing updates -- it's looking more like forgery to me, but I keep hearing different typewriter facts from different people. I wasn't alive when any of this technology existed to it's a little hard to say. Kevin Drum and my father straight-up disagree as to what you could and couldn't do with a Selectric. But some of the non-font aspects of this story smell pretty bad to me. It's confusing, though, if you don't know anything about typewriters!

Posted by: Matthew Yglesias at September 10, 2004 11:14 AM

Matt...I agree wholeheartedly that some of this is confusing. It seems to me some of the "problems" have simple explanations, not immediately apparent to most of us.

On the other hand, there are a whole host of discrepancies regarding the improper formatting of the document, per USAF standards, and a variety of other oddities.

I'm an agnostic until we have final evidence, but it does not strike me as an unreasonable assumption that they are either forgeries, or otherwise compromised documents.

I don't think the "White House bought it" angle is indicative of much, though. I know of no way they would have any particular insight into what Bush's commanding officer privately thought/wrote about Bush.

Posted by: Jon Henke at September 10, 2004 11:26 AM

All I remember about the damn things was what a pain in the ass it was to get the damn paper straight. I used mostly manuals when younger.

I don't know the proper terms for the mechanics, but if it was a unit that didn't use a ball sometimes the key arms would be out of kilter from people cleaning or clearing stuck keys, it makes some letters hit wrong on the page forever after. Also you sometimes had letters that didn't quite line up height wise with other letters on a line. They tended to line above or below the others. Some of the examples of genuine military documents people have been citing show that sort of evidence.

When you're using the electric ball type units it got cleaner and neater. Consider the woman who was married to this guy insists that he wasn't a typist. I work in an industry where keyboards are an aspect of daily life. I work with older guys who never did learn to 10 finger type. I can tell you the probability of a guy who doesn't type in the first place superscripting his TH is pretty unlikely.

Hell, just holding down the Shift key was a major operation for someone who doesn't 10 finger, hence the prevelance of older programming code to be written in all one case (upper used to be favored).

Posted by: looker at September 10, 2004 11:29 AM

Lots of blather about proportional spacing, fonts etc. But one thing is certain, the documents contain "kerned" characters. That is not possible without modern day Word Processors. It is impossible to do it on a typewriter of any genre.

Posted by: EddieP at September 10, 2004 11:51 AM

'Rove Ex Machina" - I'm gonna make a couple dozen of them for Christmas -
When you crank the handle, to the tune of Purple Haze, Carl Rove pops out of the box dressed in a TANG flight suit with a tiny forged memo in each hand.

Now, should I call it -
"Carl in the box", or "Rove in the box"?

Posted by: looker at September 10, 2004 12:08 PM

Drudge is leading that Rather stands by the documents as authentic this morning.

Posted by: pdq332 at September 10, 2004 12:27 PM

That's not exactly true, as I posted in another thread. There was one typewriter that had proportional spacing and could go one half-space back, to allow limited kerning.

However, the kerning displayed in Dale's post below is far more subtle than whta the IBM Executive was able to accomplish.

Posted by: Steverino at September 10, 2004 01:27 PM

And why would a guy who allegedly couldn't type bother to backspace to get the kerning effect?

Posted by: looker at September 10, 2004 01:50 PM

Count me among the not-completely-convinced. I'm going to think out loud here:

One company I worked for many years ago had embarked on a mission to scan all its old paper documents and use OCR software to store the text electronically. This was back when storage was pretty expensive, so they didn't want to store the documents as images.

I don't know whether the National Guard ever did such a thing, but if they did, would it not be possible for the documents to be authentic? The new font could be explained by changing the font when printing the stored text. Admittedly, that doesn't explain the signature, nor would it explain why the copy looks so poor when they could have printed another copy with no difficulty.

I don't know much about OCR software, so I don't know whether any of this is feasible.

Any thoughts?

Posted by: Steverino at September 10, 2004 01:55 PM

Not in the '70s Steverino. The prefered method for the military for decades was microfische.

Look, having served at a similar level in the Army I can tell you that the sort of 'technology' in use at that time were old manual typewriters. The electric typewriters, as I recall, began filtering in the late 70s and mostly to those at flag level. They weren't common through out until the '80s.

What would be a useful comparison is documents which were prepared by the squadron headquarters at that time that are vetted. An old duty roster, or alert schedule of something. Compare the typeface.

I'm convinced that these documents aren't from that era. That's different than saying what's on them is true or false. While there is always an outside chance that some whiz-bang electronic typewriter could have done all of these things, why in the world would it be in the hands of a man who "didn't type/hated to type" per his wife? And then why would he bother to figure out how to put the superscript "th" in there (assuming it was available on this whiz-bang electronic typewriter)?

Why would he use the wrong format? Why wouldn't he use AF letterhead? Why does his heading have a PO box instead of the AF base? Why, why, why?

The burden of proof is on CBS to produce the answers (and experts) which they say makes the memos they've displayed to be authentic.

Posted by: McQ at September 10, 2004 02:21 PM

All good points, McQ, and thank you. As I said, I wasn't completely convinced; however, I very close to being so.

The only one of those that could have been explained by scanning/OCR is the letterhead, but as you said, the military didn't use that technology. So, the OCR thoughts were heading down the wrong path. I was only offering the idea for discussion :)

Is it possible that the memos were typed by Killian's secretary? That would explain why a guy who couldn't type had a typed memo with his signature. This assumes that (a) he had a secretary, (b) the name of that secretary is known or knowable, and (c) the secretary can be found to verify that s/he typed the memos.

CBS needs to show provenance. Without it, there is too much doubt of the authenticity of these documents for them to have any meaning. If CBS cannot show where these documents came from, then these are just the 2004 edition of the Hitler diaries.

Posted by: Steverino at September 10, 2004 04:04 PM

...close your eyes, spin around, click your heels together 3 times repeating each time,..."there's no place like home, there's no place like home"...and Toto too, dorothy.....yawn
Help ease their pain in dying, kill the dinosaurs, hurry up, so their carcasses can rot and decompose sooner-- we need the oil.

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