Regular Folks Know a Lot (Free Republic, Buckhead Mentioned)

In all the blizzard of words published about Blathergate over the last couple of weeks, one paragraph caught my eye. It's this one, from the September 19 Washington Post story headlined, "In Rush to Air, CBS Quashed Memo Worries." Howard Kurtz, Michael Dobbs and James V. Grimaldi wrote it.

It quickly became clear that the people CBS hired to authenticate the documents had -- and claimed -- only limited expertise in the sometimes arcane science of computer typesetting technology and fonts. Such expertise is needed to determine whether the records could have been created in 1972 and 1973. Independent experts contacted by The Post were surprised that CBS hired analysts who were not certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, considered the gold standard in the field.

"Sometimes arcane science"? "Expertise…needed"? "Analysts…certified"? Granted, you want a credentialed expert when you take something to a courtroom, and CBS News ought to have had appropriately credentialed analysts backing up their story, too. But truly, there's very little arcane science involved in answering an immediate question: Was a piece of text created on a computer or a typewriter? Even more important, was a memo typed or printed in 1972?

The same kind of looking-down-the-nose insularity hung about the suspicions raised of one "Buckhead," the Free Republic poster whose early questioning of the Killian memos' typefaces seemed to have kicked off the whole Memogate controversy. He must have been some Republican plant, the Dem activists insisted. The timing was too suspicious. He knew too much. When Buckhead was revealed to be an Atlanta attorney with Republican affiliations, well, that cheesed it. Karl Rove had sent Buckhead a message; Buckhead had enlisted the VRWC with a few well chosen words, and there you go.

For Buckhead stuff, see here. For a complete recap of Free Republic posts on the origin of the controversy, see here.

BUT CONSIDER HOW MUCH REGULAR FOLKS KNOW. If you have not been famous or otherwise insulated, you have likely had half a dozen jobs by the age of 50. You have perhaps started, or tried to start, your own business. You have moved at least four times in adulthood, and bought and sold perhaps that many houses or condos, You have researched a number of areas of the country and lived in two or three (and not just Washington, New York, and Los Angeles). You have perhaps served a military hitch. You have had children in public schools or you've been home-schooling; you've raised funds for a church or a lodge or a Boy Scout troop. In some context or other, you have sold something door to door, published a newsletter, sold advertising, served on a committee, had a hand in hiring and firing.

If you've ever had a hobby, you probably have an expert education in something like motorcycle mechanics, photography, flying, firearms, railroad history, or ornithology.

Just to the matter at hand: Like Buckhead, who is a 46-year-old lawyer, you have probably had to work with, or even specify the purchase of, several computer systems. Indeed, you're old enough to remember when there were no computers in offices. You have participated in the entire computer revolution. You're old enough to have learned to type on a typewriter, and maybe even to have worked on one.

So what's the big mystery? Not that ordinary people knew "arcane" things about typefaces and spacing, but that the big machers at CBS didn't know perfectly ordinary things.

To have detected these forgeries did not require: Knowing the difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman, knowing the difference between the look of Times Roman printed from MicroSoft Word versus the look of the same typeface set by a Varityper, distinguishing chemical characteristics of printing inks, or -- shades of Ellery Queen -- differentiating between the signature idiosyncracies of one Underwood manual typewriter's key bars versus another's.

It required making an ordinary observation: "Hey, these things don't look like they were typed in 1972." It just required being part of the real world.

I just think that if Burkett typed them up himself that he would have done a better job on the "military-ism" details.

Burkett was Army National Guard, not Air National Guard. The "military-ism" details were Army jargon, not Air Force. In fact, his entire story about seeing Bush's records at a State-of-Texas building is a clue. Army National Guard records are retained by the state. The Army National Guard is an agency of the State. Air National Guard records are kept by the Dept. of the Air Force because the Air National Guard is a part of the Air Force, not a state agency like the ArmyNG. Not having any relationships with the AirNG, Burkett probably assumed that Bush's records would be in the same repository as Army NG records were. Burkett would have never had the opportunity to see Bush's or any other AirNG records in the State of Texas.

Unless shown otherwise, Burkett is my prime suspect creating the fake documents. He is obsessive enough with his Bush hatred to commit fraud, and at the same time mentally unstable enough to not comprehend how easily his fraud could be revealed.

The spooky, Twilight-Zone aspect of the story for me isn't that a CBS story unraveled. CBS's story was obviously never all that raveled in the first place. No. It wasn't the collapse of a story but of a media embargo.

The afternoon of The Day After, a Fox producer had replicated the experiment of several bloggers and had superimposed an MS Word document on a CBS memo. As we all know by now, it showed a perfect match. Not a good match but a PERFECT one.

Already, less than 24 hours after the broadcast, anyone can see that the best any 70s typewriter will ever get is a tie with MS Word. That's if such a typewriter is found. A perfect match will get you a tie with MS Word.

Also, Col Killian has to have done his centering, tab stops, margin settings, and word wrap in such a way as to match a future word processing program down to the pixel. Every time in six memos done over a year and a half, on a secret typewriter the rest of his office never even knew about.

So, a day later, it's obvious to anyone with a brain that the memos Dan Rather waved before the country have to be fake. Not "cannot be authenticated," but "have to be fake."

But anyone calling up the CNN, ABC, MSNBC, whatever websites saw those outlets doing the "echo and amplify" treatment on the CBS document story. They remained on-message, from a DNC viewpoint. This even as they had to know it was bogus. People in those offices had to know what everyone could see. It was all over the Web; it was on Fox.

Slowly, descriptions of the controversy found their way into stories about the documents, but strange errors occurred. The far-and-away most typical story looked like the following composite paraphrase from memory.

Many over-excited webloggers (jobless-but-not-computerless people in pajamas) have pointed out that proportional spacing and superscripting have never existed on typewriters. However, CBS has produced expert testimony that such features had existed on typewriters since the 1950s.

In other words, story after story gave only certain refutable elements of the negative reaction, together with the CBS refutation, a tactic that CBS soon echoed in its first followup broadcast. But the people doing this had to know better. In writing what they did, they had been required--well, SOMEONE had been required and the rest could have copied--to comb through all the crushing stuff to find a thing here and there which could be refuted.

For a day or two, that's what they did.

ABC and the Washington Post were the first cracks in the embargo. Dan Rather was snarling and defiant, even CBS's experts disowned CBS as fast as CBS named them in its support. You could imagine the other networks and newspapers eyeing each other, realizing that Rather's predicament had become the only real story and that so many people knew it that further pretense was ridiculous.

So one caved and another and another. What clearly was to have been the media wing of OPERATION FAVORITE SON defected in favor of a Rather roast. Well, you can only pretend so far.

Quite an episode, though. Sometimes you know you're not paranoid. They really DO think they control your horizontal and your vertical.

Well, maybe not anymore.

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