Posted on 09/10/2004 4:28:44 AM PDT by backhoe
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| - saying 'character counts' in a president -- | ||||||
Good Work!
If there's an annual award for the Greatest Cataloger in Cyberspace, it has got to be named the backhoe Award.
You are the man.
Bookmarked.
Appreciate the kind words- thanks, Luis!
Another gem! Bookmarked for posterity.
Mary Mapes: Rathergate Revisionist
Ousted CBS Producer Comes Out Swinging, and connects with absolutely nothing. Mapes’s pathetic attempt to continue the charade that the CBS National Guard memos were genuine documents is simply destroyed by this animated GIF graphic, showing my version created in minutes with the default settings in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, overlaid on the CBS News Killian memo supposedly from August 19, 1973:
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But if you need more, TigerHawk tears apart Mapes’s ridiculous, transparently self-serving excuses.
CBS Document Examiner: Mapes is Lying
Emily Will, the document examiner who expressed serious misgivings about the infamous CBS News National Guard memos even before they were definitively proven to be fakes, takes apart some of the false and misleading claims in ex-producer Mary Mapes’ ridiculous book: MemoGate - Duty to Tell the Truth. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/
The architect chief victim of Rathergate is out flogging a book. It doesn't appear as though she used the time off since her firing to improve her research skills. The "anonymous" Bill Ardolino;
I will grant her one thing - the "school of sharks" analogy is pretty accurate, though her description of a helpless victim (a multi-million dollar respected professional news organization) is a bit ... off. And let's not forget who chummed the water.
This is good, too.
Slate Floats the Fake But Accurate Theory Again
These guys just never stop trying to pull that wool back over our eyes.
The latest mainstream media mouthpiece to float the idea that the CBS Texas Air National Guard memos—shown conclusively to be obvious frauds—could possibly be genuine is Timothy Noah at Slate. link: 110 comments
Mary Mapes is in the Huffington Post (your one-stop source for the craziest of the loony left) today, insisting once again that the fraudulent CBS National Guard memos were genuine typewritten documents from the 1970s: Mary Mapes: In Defense of Dan Rather.
As Newsbusters says: link: 194 comments
"Typical Drive-By Media ( LLL3 ) partial truth hand waving bullsh*t. She's such a defensive malevolent liar."
The guy who tried to defraud the American public and skew a presidential election with phony documents moralizes about “right-wing hatred:” Dan Rather on pro-Bush hate. "I think the "vitriol" is coming from the fact that most sane people are "laughing" at the far left and Dan Rather. And the left can't stand it. "
Dan Rather appeared on Larry King Live tonight, and the most charitable description one can give Rather is incoherent. He could barely complete a sentence, and when he could, he sputtered about grand conspiracies among "Big Corporations" to undermine independent journalism. Declaring that "this is the right fight at the right time," he couldn't explain why he told Larry King that he and CBS made a mistake in running the story, only eight months after the collapse of the CBS story.
It's almost breathtaking in its excruciating wonder. He says that he's the only man who bring out the truth about what happened at CBS, when he could stammer out a coherent thought at all. Bear in mind that the truth-seeking Rather still thinks that his source (Bill Burkett) has never been impeached, that the type-set memos still haven't been proven impossible to produce on the Texas Air National Guard's typewriters of the day, that Rather ignores that Burkett now no longer claims that he delivered the originals to CBS but retyped copies from a mysterious Lucy Ramirez, and that the memos themselves had numerous context and formatting errors. If the truth bit Dan Rather on any of his extremities, he still wouldn't recognize it.
Of course, Rather tried to steer the conversation away from the documents whenever he could. He now claims that the documents are little more than red herrings, even though CBS proclaimed them as the proof of their story at the time. Instead of acknowledging the fraud of the memos, he accused Dick Thornburgh of participating in a fraud in the internal CBS investigation. He insists that the network forced him to deliver a fraudulent apology -- well, more or less forced, as he continually backed away from it. When that didn't work, he kept bringing up Abu Ghraib, as if that story -- which CBS reported months earlier -- had anything to do with the TANG story.
The one word that describes Rather outside of incoherent is paranoid. He keeps blaming Big Corporations and Big Government for his downfall, and thinks people like Sumner Redstone and Les Moonves are in on the conspiracy, along with the Bush administration. He held himself up as the epitome of the objective, idealistic journalist, the only one willing to tell Truth to Power. However, when King played a clip from Mike Wallace in 2006 saying that Rather should have resigned when CBS fired the team that produced the TANG story, Rather got rather defensive about having all of his previously-declared integrity challenged.
King, by the way, barely kept his skepticism hidden. He wasn't buying it, and neither would anyone who watched this pathetic collapse of Rather.
UPDATE: Our friend Bernie Goldberg also called Rather "paranoid" -- and that was before Rather's appearance on Larry King. Goldberg says CBS shouldn't and won't settle. The most delicious part of this lawsuit will be CBS arguing that the memos were fraudulent, because that's the only way they can defend against Rather's suit.
UPDATE II: A couple of minor grammatical corrections, as well as mistakenly putting Abu Ghraib after the TANG story instead of before it. That begs the question -- if CBS wanted to curry favor with the Bush administration, why would Les Moonves have allowed the Abu Ghraib story to remain at the top of the CBS play list for so long?
Posted by Ed Morrissey on September 20, 2007 10:02 PM | Comments (28)
"Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs, live blogged this. It seems Dan Rather made a statement about "Little Green Flame." ... Not that he knows anything about the Internet, mind you.
For those who don't remember? Charles Johnson put up the pulsing "overlays." Taking the C-BS "memo" used by Rather, as "proof" that Bush avoided his National Guard Service.
And, that's where you could see the Microsoft program; in Courier; doing the proportional spacing that was UNAVAILABLE in the 1970's.
Proving that what Dan Rather was saying was FAKE. Not even forged. SInce real documents never existed.
Lucy Ramirez never existed.
And, Bush did not lose his re-election bid in 2004.
Left a lot of the mainstream media, reporting election night, as if someone in the family had died. They were glum.
Now? Dan Rather's just crazy."
Mapes' Mother-of-all-Rants--Mapes's meltdown-in-the-guise-of-a-column appeared in yesterday's Huffington Post. Excerpts from the metaphor-gone-wild "Courage for Dan Rather" No basis in fact? I challenge Mapes to debunk this "Little Green Footballs" item of September 10, 2004. The author overlays the infamous "CYA" Memogate document on a Word document he created. It's not just a good fit. Not merely a close fit. It is an absolutely perfect, down to the last jot-and-tittle fit. Mapes has no basis in reality.
Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 4:43:14 pm PDT
In a borderline psychotic screed at Arianna Huffington’s hate site, Mary Mapes peddles lies to the left-wing sheep, who all believe her: Mary Mapes: Courage for Dan Rather. 292 comments
Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:41:41 pm PDT
Dan Rather, who was the stooge in a plot to tilt a presidential election with phony documents, is suing CBS for $70 million, and still insisting the documents weren’t proven to be fake.
Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a $70 million lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.
Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005.
He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.” As plaintiffs, the suit names CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its chief executive, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.
It wasn’t the investigation that damaged Rather’s reputation. It was his own actions ... and this:
UPDATE at 9/19/07 1:23:28 pm:
Bummerdietz looks forward to discovery.
Rather’s Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1938403/posts
This is Chapter 13 of the new book To Set the Record Straight: How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry,.... It tells the story of how Freepers ([at Free Republic.com]) exposed Dan Rather’s fraudulent National Guard documents story during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Excerpt:
[..................]
The carefully orchestrated efforts of CBS News, the Kerry campaign and the DNC began to unravel while “For the Record” was still on the air. At 7:39 P.M. Eastern, twenty minutes before 60 Minutes Wednesday began, FreeRepublic.com poster “Howlin” started a “live thread” to track the program as it aired. On that thread, presciently titled, “Ben Barnes and CBS Attempt Another Bush Smear (60 Minutes),” the Freepers posted sardonic commentary (“I just sent another donation to the Swiftees” and “CBS should have to register as a Democrat 527”) as the segment unfolded. Minutes into the segment, close-ups of the documents were briefly shown. At 8:19 P.M., Paul Boley, an active duty Air Force officer in Alabama, posted as “TankerKC”:
WE NEED TO SEE THOSE MEMOS AGAIN!
They are not in the style that we used when I came in to [sic] the USAF. They looked like the style and format we started using about 12 years ago (1992). Our signature blocks were left justified, now they are right of center . . . like the ones they just showed.
Can we get a copy of those memos?
60 Minutes ended its report and went off the air, but on FreeRepublic.com the discussion and analysis carried on far into the night. At 9:44 P.M., “jhouston” posted:
I was in the AF Reserve in [19]72 stationed at Ellington AFB (same as Bush). I was a personal clerk and was responsible for cutting numerous orders (mostly TDA, short term activations and reassignments).
I cannot speak for procedures at the TANG, but I assume they followed the same procedures that we did.
All of the memos showed a centered TYPED heading instead of being typed on letterhead (yes we used letterhead or standardized forms back then).
ALL order [sic] were typed on a standardized form. . . .
One minute later, “BamaDi” replied to “TankerKC’s earlier post”:
i didn’t watch 60 minutes but you’re exactly right about the signature blocks . . . goodness, i should know, i was a secretary for the DAF from 1969 to 1991 when i left the pentagon to work for the navy and the signature block was ALWAYS on the left hand margin. . . .
At 11:11 P.M., “Pikamax” started a second discussion thread for the New York Times’ front-page article for Thursday’s paper: “Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard.” At 11:18, Howlin linked to the newly posted memos at CBSNews.com. Now, those tracking the thread could assess the documents for themselves.
Then, at 11:59:53, Harry MacDougald, a conservative 46-year-old Atlanta attorney posting at FreeRepublic.com as “Buckhead,” fired the shot heard ’round the Web:
Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.
The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction 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 systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.
This should be pursued aggressively.
At 12:10 A.M., MacDougald added:
This is going to be hilarious, because every major news organization is running with this bogus story like it’s a new toy on Christmas morning.
To which “NYCVirago” replied at 12:15 A.M.:
Exactly. It seems like that if CBS were concerned about journalistic integrity, instead of smearing Bush, they would have checked out the authenticity of these documents, something you figured out in a quick perusal of them.
MacDougald’s assessment was on the money: the memos were printed in Times New Roman, Microsoft Word’s default font. An explosion of research and analysis followed.
At 7:51 A.M., Scott Johnson featured MacDougald’s revelations at Power Line in an article titled, “The Sixty-First Minute.” More information poured in as the blog’s readers contrasted the characteristics of the memos with the capabilities of 1970’s-vintage typewriters. Perhaps the most damning observations came from Jon-Erik Prichard:
1. The type in the [August 18, 1973] document is KERNED. Kerning is the typ[e]setter’s art of spacing various letters in such a manner that they are ‘grouped’ for better readability. Word processors do this automatically. NO TYPEWRITER CAN PHYSICALLY DO THIS.
To explain: the letter “O” is curved on the outside. A letter such as “T” has indented space under its cross bar. On a typewriter if one types an “O” next to a “T” then both letters remain separated by their physical space. When you type the same letters on a computer next to each other the[y] are automatically “kerned” or “grouped” so that their individual spaces actually overlap. e. g., TO. As one can readily see the curvature of the “O” nestles neatly under the cross bar of the “T”. . . . A typewriter doesn’t “know” what particular letter is next to another and can’t make those types of aesthetic adjustments.
2. The kerning and proportional spacing in each of the lines of type track EXACTLY with 12 point Times Roman font on a six inch margin (left justified). . . .
3. The sentences have a wide variance in their AMOUNT of kerning and proportional spacing. . . . Even the characters themselves are squished in the first line (as a computer does automatically) and more spread out on the last line where there is more room.
There’s no way a typewriter could ‘set’ the type in this memo. . . .
Another Power Line reader noted that none of Killian’s previously released 1970s memos had used superscriptingthe raised printing of suffixes in unit numbers such as “111th” and “147th”but the 60 Minutes memos did. Superscripting, assuming it could be found at all on a 1970s-era typewriter, was an expensive, specialized feature, one unlikely to be found on the office machine of a Texas Air National Guard commander.
Power Line’s analysis concluded with eloquent simplicity: “60 Minutes is toast.”
During a Swift Vets phone conference on Thursday morning, the group’s chairman, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, asked the group whether the 60 Minutes story was likely to affect the group’s own efforts. The consensus was that it would. A CRC representative pointed out that all the major papers and networks were featuring the story and suggested it would likely overshadow the Swift Vets’ message for some time. Scott Swett had tracked the story overnight as the memos were systematically exposed by FreeRepublic.com and the blogs. Now, feeling like a man reporting back from a day or two in the future, Swett told the Swift Vet leaders that the documents were forgeries, the story was doomed, and the Kerry campaign’s counterattack was dead on arrival. CRC quickly contacted Cybercast News Service (CNS), which had three typographical experts examine the documents and started working on a story.
By Thursday afternoon, West coast bloggers were adding compelling new evidence to the case against CBS. Little Green Footballs host Charles Johnson provided a visual coup de grace at 10:24 A.M. Pacific [1:24 P.M. Eastern]:
9/9/2004: Bush Guard Documents: Forged
I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as “authentic.”
A screenshot of the “original” document as found at CBS: [snip]
Continue reading here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1938403/posts
Son offa Bee! It just won't stay dead:
MORE NEWS ON THE RATHERGATE SCANDAL: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.
Some stories should never die!
Agreed- like the proverbial albatross.
Thanks for stopping by.
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