Posted on 01/07/2005 7:10:20 AM PST by Davis
For four months, Rathergate gestated in the belly of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). Finally, the mountain labored and brought forth a pipsqueak.
Corey Pein, a stalwart of that noble guardian of media matters has published a long, (3400 words) tedious, and foolish analysis whose primary point is to absolve CBS and Dan Rather of the blame for publicizing the famous Burkett forgeries last September on 60 Minutes II.
Pein signals his disposition in the title of his piece—Blog-Gate. The offence, you see, was the blog world's exposure of the forgeries with astonishing swiftness and transparency. Then, sheeplike, to their shame, Pein avers, the mainstream media followed the bellwethers.
Pein demonstrates a shaky grasp of the notion of relevance. Thus, he doesn't quote Buckhead's famous Free Republic post #47, he simply denigrates it with this: "...whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta. (MacDougald refused to tell the Times how he was able to mount a case against the documents so quickly.)"
Slippery, right? Buckhead is a Republican and worse, wouldn't tell the LATimes how he did it. Shocking. And he was able to accomplish in 4 hours what Pein couldn't do in 4 months.
Here's Buckhead's post. Observe how it is tainted with Republican bias.
Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush'‘s failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatine or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90''s.
Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80''s used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.
Pein skips blithely over CBS's part in the affair. He says nothing about the provenance of the memos. Where have they been for 30+ years, under whose care and control? If Pein had any idea of "chain of evidence" requirements, he doesn't let on.
The fundamental CBS error lay in going ahead without the originals. We can guess that it was the urgency of the presidential campaign that set CBS off prematurely. But it isn't necessary to speculate about why Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, who had been focusing on the Bush-Texas Air National Guard story for five years, did not insist on having the originals. The fact is, they didn't.
Pein mucks up this matter of the "originals." he pretends to know something about them. "They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents." ,
But how in hell does he know any of this? It's just as likely that Burkett, a notorious anti-Dubya flake who admitted to having had "several mental breakdowns" constructed them out of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, then resurrected them at a Kinko's in Abilene, about 20 miles from his home running them through many times to blur the stretch marks.
Pein sees the light through a glass eye, darkly. and writes: "Copies cannot be authenticated either way [emphasis added] with absolute certainty."
What this translates to is an assertion that there's no way to prove that the Rather/Burkett memos are phony. Which is precisely Pein's position. Nor is absolute certainty required. Mere certainty or reasonable certainty will suffice.
It is Pein's contention that there is no proof and no proof is possible to establish from the documents themselves that they're phony.
No, Mr. Pein, although you can't authenticate a copy there is no logical reason you can't prove that what purports to be a copy is a phony.
If you find a manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars written in Yiddish, you can bet it is not original. If a document purportedly written in the 13th century has references to Ford's Model T, it's a phony. If a document purportedly written in 1973 was composed on machinery not available for at least 10 years after that date, it's a phony, bogus, a forgery.
Got the picture, Pein?
No, he doesn't. It is beyond his powers to understand what was clear to Buckhead, to Charles Johnson, to Joseph Newcomer, Hindrocket at Power Line Blog and to me when we saw the Rathergate memos posted on the CBS website. They weren't prepared on a typewriter. They were computer generated documentS composed with machinery and software not available to Col. Jerry Killian, 1971-1973.
What's the evidence for this conclusion? The appearance of the documents themselves.
Mr. Pein remaineth unconvinced. He is entirely unimpressed with the fact that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and Joseph Newcomer duplicated on of the memos dot-for-dot by using the default margin settings for MS Word, font New Times Roman, size 12 points.
Here's what Pein says in response:
Newcomer begins with the presumption that the documents are forgeries, and as evidence submits that he can create a very similar document on his computer. This proves nothing —— you could make a replica of almost any document using Word. Yet Newcomer''s aggressive conclusion is based on this logical error.
There is no logical error here. Where and with what presumption Newcomer started is irrelevant. There is no evidence of Republican bias doing its devilish duty. The images fit one over the other because both were constructed using the default margin setting of MS Word, font New Times Roman.
•
If this is the best Pein and CJR can do, it's time to close up the shop and sell off the furniture.
Normal modus operandi of the left, to obscure what they are, and never acknowledge the criminal lies, spin, misrepresentation and deceit that is the necessary essence of their existence, which in itself, is a living lie.
Thereby turning long-established journalistic standards on their ear. The documents do not have to be proven to be true - instead, critics have to prove they are phony. In other words, we have to prove a negative.
I've scanned documents with my flatbed scanner using OCR software, and the damned software would then save the document in a proportional font, ruining the nicely spaced columns of numbers.
So it is possible the documents were legitimate copies of originals, but I doubt it. The signature blocks were definately manipulated electronically in several of the RatherGate memoes, which would take deliberate operator intervention.
If I remember right, the dates were typed. It's been my experience that dates were always stamped, after they were signed.
No date on the signature, but the signature loops through Col. Killian's (proportionally spaced font) title block, so it was more than just a simple doucment scan that made the entire memo proportonal. (The signature would not have OCR'd, obviously.)
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