[RatherBiased.com]

Please join us this evening as we carve up roast anchorman in a live fisking. Send suggestions to blogs@ratherbiased.com We're looking especially for military sources regarding things like abbreviations, etc.

[rebel_yell2]

Time to stick'm with a LONG fork! I think Dan is WELL-done.

[Sir Gawain]

William Pitt and the DUmmies are saying Rather buried the charges. They look rather funny on their knees for Rather.

[spyone]

Excellently written article!

[T'wit]

As one who grew up with "who" and "whom," I react sharply to the latter-day error of substituting "that." Thus I was struck by phrasing in the "memo" of August 1, 1972, "... qualified Vietnam pilots that have rotated...."

I don't believe anyone would have written this in 1972. It would have been, "...pilots who have rotated...."

[DaveMSmith]

Thanks for the summary... hopefully you won't have to worry about Dan TheNewsMan's misconduct much longer!

[flashbunny]

don't you mean "staudt had retired in 1972" not 1973???

[Redcoat LI]

Please join us this evening as we carve up roast anchorman

I'd like a wing, the left wing,preferably.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

More good stuff...ping.

[Shortstop7]

Very well done. Thank you.

[Polybius]

We're looking especially for military sources regarding things like abbreviations, etc.

The bottom line in this case will be provided by forensic experts that will provide proof that no typewriter had the combination of features used in that memo.

Rather's defense is childishly naive. Yes, Times New Roman has been around since the 1930's......On Linotype machines:

History will judge Dan Rather as either a scoundrel or a fool.

For subjective military trivia.........

One memo had the date written as (let's use today's date):

11 September, 2004.

Proper military dating would have been:

11 September 2004

or

11 SEP 04

The date would never have had a comma after the date.

Another eye-catcher was an officer simply putting a rank in the signature space without then putting the branch of service right after it.

[Polybius]

The date would never have had a comma after the date.

Typo.

The date would never have had a comma after the month.

[Dont Mention the War]

From the comments page of http://wizbangblog.com/archives/003629.php:

Author: Timmer
Web Site: http://digitalwarfighter.com

Comment:
Old AF Admin Wheenie with 20 years in service here. One thing I haven't heard a lot about, only a little, is the format of some of the documents. They're just wrong. The headers are wrong. The signature blocks are wrong. They're just WRONG.

There's no such thing as a Memo for file. There's a Memorandum for Record, but no Memo for file. NO SUCH THING.

Addressing an official document with

MEMORANDUM FOR:

didn't occur until the 1990s. The AF didn't move their signature blocks over to the right of the documents until the same time, before then they were anchored four clear lines down the left margin.

An official signature block looks like this.

JOHN S. SUPERTROOP, Rank, USAF
Duty Title

Three line signature blocks are reserved for flag officers (Generals) and Colonels sitting in a General's billet. But they look like

JOHN S. SUPERTROOP
General, USAF
Duty Title

Now civilians may scoff and say so what? Who cares about admin details like that? Ummmmm, the military does...quite a bit too much actually. I've seen inspection teams tear entire careers apart over the admin details being mucked up.

There isn't an admin guy in any branch of the service who wouldn't have taken one look at these documents and waved the bullshit flag. You could show those documents to any airman coming fresh out of school down at Keesler and they'd have a blast tearing them apart.

Those documents aren't just fakes...they're really really bad fakes. And all it would have taken was someone with some sense of how these things are done. The more I look at them...the more I get the feeling that someone sort of scanned through http://www.e-publishing.af.mil/pubfiles/af/33/afman33-326/afman33-326.pdf AFM 33-326 and shoved all this together. Before that we had AFR 10-1 and it had the formats I mentioned above.

Remember though, before anyone goes, "Hey, that looks right." We didn't use that manual until 1996 and it's been updated since then.

Bottom line, wrong fonts, wrong headers, wrong formats. It's bullshit, you can't hide from it.

[Diddle E. Squat]

Fox News Channel reported this evening that like each NG member, Bush had until his birthday, in late July, to take his physical, and a 3 month window in which to do so. The May letter ordering him to take a physical is just a couple of weeks into the 12 week window, and so there was no reason that one of his superiors would order him to take a physical when he still had 10 weeks left to take it.

[lainde]

Please join us this evening as we carve up roast anchorman in a live fisking

I'll take my portion without ketchup, please...

[ProfoundMan]

A small point, but MemoGate concerned the leaked Intelligence Committe memos. It might be better to refer to this as RatherGate so as not to confuse the two while also pointing the finger of suspicion where it belongs. Especially since we're now being viewed by a larger audience, it will pay to be clear.