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Posted on 09/11/2004 12:05:54 PM PDT by buzzyboop
On September 10, 2004, Dan Rather declared war on the internet. He shouldn't have because it's a battle he is destined to lose. Addressing only a small part of the hundreds of criticisms that web-based critics and assorted typewriter, font, and military experts have lodged against his report, Rather and his CBS colleagues seem to have a masochistic desire for punishment. Our latest updates on the Memogate controversy are posted below. For our 21-point rebuttal to Rather's Sept. 10 salvo, click here.
The unraveling continues. Two of the three people cited on-camera by CBS News as vouching for its conclusion that Jerry Killian--the former Air National Guard commanding officer of George W. Bush--authored incriminating memoranda about the future president have, in subsequent interviews with other media organizations, tempered their support for CBS.
Robert Strong, who served with Killian as an officer tells the New York Times that he does not believe that his former associate used a proportional font typewriter during his time in the Texas guard.
"Mr. Strong said in an interview Friday he was quite sure that he and others used Selectrics in the adjutant general's office. He added that he was not sure the typewriters and devices were also in the 147th Combat Support Squadron at the Ellington base in Houston, home of the 111th squadron.
"'I'm skeptical that Killian was working on that,' Mr. Strong said."
Strong's comments come on the heels of a statement from Marcel Matley, a writing analyst whom CBS presented as having certified its four documents. Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, however, Matley said that he only vouched for one to the network.
I am just back from work and blather's blunder was the hot topic
Imagine trying to create a document that exactly matched the default settings of an unknown word processor that might be invented in a couple decades. Even if with modern word processors and the budget of NASA, you couldn't do it without a sample.
what a dumb mistake. Learn to use the language AndyTheBear.
So. How much do you think the Killians will be raking in from
CBS? Hundreds of thousands? Milllions? Tens of Millions? . . .Well, they oughta !! And then there's punitive damages.
A propos de rien...I never watch CBS, but Rather's face will ocasionally surface on other news sources I frequent. Is it just me, or is he looking more and more like Fidel Castro (sans beaver) every time I see him?
I heard a soccer mom say this weekend that she is so "sick" of the "negative campaigning" that she may sit out the election! Maybe she should sit it out.
Well, if it is a NYC jury, maybe not much at all!
Had the forger consistently used any of the styles of ordinals he used, it would be plausible he was trying to get away with faking these documents. But if a forger noticed the auto-superscripting and didn't like it, why didn't he kill it everyplace it appeared or--failing that--why didn't he at least settle on one or the other means of preventing it? If the forger weren't concerned about such details, he would have simply let Word auto-superscript when it felt like it. That someone would go through the trouble of killing some but not all such things is a clear sign to me that the person wanted to write "I AM AN MS-WORD FAKE" all over the document.
If you are assuming that the CBS documents' Strong is Prof. Robert Strong of Washington & Lee Univ, you are mistaken.
I speak as one who Googled "Professor Robert Strong" and came up with two of them -- one a Politics Professor at W&L (who administers a Soros grant program), another who teaches Finance at the Univ of Maine.
I initially fingered the professor at W & L, too. But he has since posted on his webpage any association with the affair.
Net:net -- we still don't know who CBS's Robert Strong is, nor what his credentials might be.
Part of Rather Biased's problem is that the TX Democrat party has not won a single statewide election for any office since 1994, when it elected a lt. governor, attorney general, and comptroller. I would imagine that such a streak of losses greatly "disappoints" Rather Biased, and he is only, in the words of the once popular Speaker Jim Wright, "trying to help" his party.
Would the trial (against CBS) be in NYC or if the lawsuit were brought by Mrs. Killian in the state of Texas, would it go to trial in Texas?
Technology existed in 1972 that would have allowed someone to produce a milimeter-perfect replica of a Word 2000 document such as these, if they'd wanted to take the time to do it and if they had specifications for exactly how the characters should be spaced.
The question is not whether it would have been physically possible to produce these documents, but whether someone in 1972 who wasn't an experienced typist and wasn't interested in doing anything fancy typographically would--by chance--produce documents which happen to match the spacing produced by a computer program that wouldn't even be written for another couple decades.
To use analogy, suppose that in 2006 Microsoft changes its default font to Tahoma 11, the default side margins to 0.9", the default tab stops to 0.55", and the default top margin to 0.75". Suppose further that Microsoft decides (for some reason) that military ranks and dates should be written with smallcaps in place of lowercase, and that recognized acronyms should be written entirely in smallcaps.
Suppose further that it is the year 2008 and someone introduces a document, supposedly from 2004, which happens to exhibit with all of the above document settings and behaviors that appeared in Word 2006. Further assume that some acronyms, which don't happen to be in Microsoft's list, remain in allcaps.
Would you assume that somebody in 2004 magically happened to type the document so as to match the behavior of Word 2006, or would you assume that somebody in 2006 would think Dan Rather enough of a moron to be fooled the same way twice?
Note that there would be no question that the document could have been produced in 2004. But would it be plausible to believe that any such document was produced then in the absense of a causal relationship between the document's creator and Word's new behaviors?
"Two of the three people cited on-camera by CBS News as vouching for its conclusion that Jerry Killian--
---Robert Strong
--- Marcel Matley
=======
Make that three out of three are backing off.
"A former Texas Air National Guard colonel relied upon by CBS News to support the authenticity of memos about President Bush's military service said he never saw the memos before the show aired, and that he doesn't now believe they are authentic.
Hodges, who retired from the Guard in 1989, said that after he saw the typewritten memos on Friday morning, he believed Killian did not, in fact, write them. "I don't think Killian wrote them - official or unofficial," he said."
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/election2004/9640726.htm?1c
You are so, right on! sorry, didnt mean to sound hippie, just feeling slap-happy. I've been hating Dan Rather for years now, with growing intensity. He has taken the form of twisting the truth to a new art-level. He actually said on his CBS Evening News, about a month ago, (...I never forgot his words...) -- that the turmoil, strife, and killing, raping, burning of villages of the innocents in the Darfur region, ws the end result of our going to war in Iraq, he said; since we kept the world "occupied" with our troubles....
That presentation at the link you provided is GREAT!
THANK YOU, Grampa Dave for that link! It just went out in a mass emailing.... ;-)
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