Posted on 09/09/2004 7:55:59 AM PDT by pabianice
On a previous thread the author makes excellent points about the anachronism error in the "memos" the Liberals have recently "discovered" regarding George Bush's alleged "desertion" and "dereliction of duty" while in the Texas ANG.
A look at these memos shows another problem. A big problem. To understand it, you have to understand a bit about the military. In official documents of any kind, proper rank abbreviations are strictly enforced, to the point that, if they are incorrect, the document has to be destroyed and rewritten. A document forwarded with incorrect acronyms is returned for resubmittal.
The "memos" the Liberal Gang has "discovered," showing Bush to have been a shirker, all carry a consistent incorrect abbreviation for his rank. The only acceptable abbreviation for a USAF or ANG first lieutenant is "1LT." I have also seen, rarely, it written "1/LT," although this is the exception. All the "recently discovered" memos about Bush say "1stLt." While I am Navy and not Air Force, to the best of my knowledge, this is not allowed, let alone a mispunctuated memo addressed to Bush as "1stLt.3244754FG."
I am willing to bet a week's pay that these memos are forgeries.
"The first electric typewriter was built in 1902 by Blickensderfer and was called the Blick Electric. The first electric typewriter which attained some sort of commercial success was the Remington Electric of 1925.
Eventually in 1933 Remington's electric typewriter was taken over by International Business Machines (IBM) under the name Electromatic.
In 1947 the Executive model with proportional spacing was introduced by, followed by the single-element Selectric in 1960 - commonly known today as the "golf-ball" as the type element was easily interchangeable."
From a Swedish page on the history of typewriters:
I'm still active duty after 21 - I've never cared diddly squat about rank abbreviations. If I'm writing an OPR or a medal citation - yes. But a memo was just a memo, and emails are just emails...what I use varies from day to day.
I could easily imagine a TANG LTC (or Lt Col, or LtC, or some other variation) using a non-standard format.
On the other hand, in the early 80s when I was in my first fighter squadron, no one TYPED an unofficial memo. Much faster to write it by hand. But that just may have been in that squadron...
I think you're wrong. Would a doctor writing a personal note to his files abbreviate "doctor" as "Doc."? Of course not; when we write informally, we use the abbreviations we have been trained to use when writing formally. I'm a lawyer; there's a standard way to abbreviate case names; I tend to follow that style even when typing things for my personal use.
Say, isn't it the letter "O" for officer, and not "oh" meaning zero? I say that because enlisted ranks are abbreviated "E."
That makes one of you. In 21 years in the Navy I never saw any official document with an incorrect abbreviation of rank. Mistakes were destroyed and started over again. A senior officer using an incorrect rank abbreviation never happened.
We had Selectrics when I was in the USMC in the 1980s, but we still used monospaced fonts, mostly because DD-173 message forms had a limit of 69 characters per line.
Bald-faced lying, cheating, and subterfuge are now the centerpieces of their desperate "Elect Kerry" campaign...
The Democrats have calculated by the time the maniacal onslaught of bogus stories about Dubya sponsored by CBSNBCABCCNN are investigated or proven untrue, it will be after the election.
In the meantime all they are hoping for is ANY floated fabrication about Bush to gain traction to distract from Kerry's Hindenburg-like record.
That is proof positive if true. Super script "th" is the hallmark of a word processed document. MS Word has this annoying habit of superscripting "th" all over the place. I hate it because it looks ugly, and try to eradicate it when I can. (It takes some doing.)
But I'm sure CBS's master forger can take in all these criticisms and produce a cleaned up copy typed on an antique typewriter in time for the Sunday talk shows.
You can turn it off in Auto-correct, under Auto Format as You Type, but I'm not sure how you'd get rid of inherited superscripts - Find & Replace, probably.
And quoting another dead guy.
I can hear Rather now on election night:
"John Kerry: as F***ed as a horned toad under a moonlit Texas sky."
Personal experience talking? ;-)
Bump for later reading
Just another democratic forged document. Put them in prison for life.
LOL. Glad you caught the Rather-ism / Texas horned toad interplay.
IBM had a typewriter with proportional spacing. If I remember correctly it was called an IBM Executive. i's and l's used 2 units of space; m's used 5 units. They were a pain to work with. They were available in the 60's and through the 70's.
It is a ZERO, not an "O". The O is for officer, that is correct. My bad it I hit the wrong key.
>>That is proof positive if true. Super script "th" is the hallmark of a word processed document. MS Word has this annoying habit of superscripting "th" all over the place. I hate it because it looks ugly, and try to eradicate it when I can. (It takes some doing.)
But I'm sure CBS's master forger can take in all these criticisms and produce a cleaned up copy typed on an antique typewriter in time for the Sunday talk shows.>>
I've also noticed the apostrophe is from a word processor, not a typewriter. There are the possessive pronouns "I'll" in one of the documents, and "He's" in another. Note that the apostrophe is to the left, as a closed quote from a single quote mark, which is what a word processor would do. A word processor will insert an open single quote mark elsewhere, when appropriate. BUT A TYPWRITER HAS ONLY ONE CHARACTER, THAT IS NOT CURVED, so that the typist can use it both as an open and closed single quote mark or an apostrophe.
Those were written on a computer, not a typewriter.
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