The President of The United States
Deal with it!
Jim Schutze destroys his own credibility and his own argument. He is the one who can't muster any honest intellectual curiosity about the story. Rather, he comes to his conclusions by relying on authority and on one-sided, weak rebuttals, and childish name-calling, while ignoring what his own eyes can tell him.
Using the same criteria that he approves, I could produce fake-but-accurate memos alleging that Jim Schutze is a serial child molester or a Soviet spy, and he would be unable to refute those allegations. Do people like Jim Schutze become newspaper columnists in spite of their lack of critical thinking skills, or is that a prerequisite for the job?
1. As others have said so many times, the burden of proof is to prove a document is true, not to prove it is false. Mapes has reversed that presumption because of the weak position she is in intellectually.
2. It is amazing to hear journalists caught thinking out loud: we would not expect fakes to have a "smooth factual mesh" with genuine documents? You can't be serious! This is EXACTLY what you would expect from a fake! Who ever fakes a document without taking great pains to make it "mesh" with other known facts in the context? What boneheads these people must be.
3. I have not read Mapes' book, but maybe one of these true believers could extract just ONE NEW FACTUAL ARGUMENT from the book to refute the KNOWN FACT that the document matches exactly the default settings in Microsoft Word, which match creates an even greater PRESUMPTION that the document is fake unless proven true.
I'm the KKK? Hardly. I mean, admittedly I went to a few cross burnings in my younger days, mostly out of curriosity, but I never actually completed the initiation (although I did pay the non-refundable fee), so saying I'm "IN the Klan" is clearly a gross mischaracterization of me.
Owl_Eagle
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
If they had followed these rules TankerKC wouldn't have seen that the memos were the wrong format for USAF memos of the time, Buckhead wouldn't have seen the type face, and the image switching between the "original" and the MS Word version could never have been created. Mapes and Rather would likely have gotten away with it.
Nobody that matters is interested in your book
Regards,
Oz
P.S. People in third world countries without toilet paper will eventually appreciate your efforts.
I stopped reading right there. Surprisingly decent? What an a-hol'ish thing to say.
Then why are you trying to be one?
You don't have to be an expert on forty year old typewriters to be an expert on moden proportional fonts and typefaces, and the Internet is surely full of those.
This argument is predicated on the writer's own admitted ignorance.
Ms. Mapes (and anyone who has even a smattering of a doubt that the documents could be authentic), you should read a thorough analysis by an expert in the field:
http://www.flounder.com/bush2.htm
The documents are fake, fraudulent, a total fabrication...Ms. Mapes, you have absolutely no excuse to claim otherwise except that YOU ARE A DELUSIONAL LIAR.
No go crawl into a little hole and enjoy your status as a small footnote to a pivotal day in history.
What can In say. Many times during my tour in Vietnam in 1970-1971, when I sat in my Navy squadron's Admin Office working on official forms, I would complain how my Dell Inspiron Pentium 4 laptop was misbehaving, how the computer's version of MS Word for Windows 98 was giving me trouble, or how the LaserJet IV printer had jammed again. This poor woman's victimization by an evil White House is shameful.
This may shock the incurably stupid left, but in matters of logic one is required to prove the veracity of an assertion. If the documents were asserted to be authentic, then it's up to Bong Hit Mapes to prove it.
Defies all logic. People are the KKK if the dare accuse the media of using fake documents to try to take down the president. The media is entitled to use fake documents on national TV to defame a person, and the media is above criticism when they get caught???
Didn't the other thread say that even Mapes herself didn't say the docs were authentic, that they were just never proven to be fakes?
Typical journalist answer.
The President of The United States
Deal with it!
I have read Mapes' arguments. I think she does not understand the evidence. I suspect ideology is blinding her.
Ah, yes, we've heard all about her defense of the typeface issues. How it there WERE typewriters that could do superscript and proportional spacing back then.
Now, let's look at the PROBABILITY that the good Colonel actually USED one of such typewriters to write a simple, clunky personnel memo:
- Such typewriters were very expensive.
- Such typewriters were very difficult to set up and use.
- Such typewriters were typically used to produce near photo-ready copy, not routine memos.
- The Colonel was not a very good typist.
Therefore, Mapes would have us believe that he would use a very expensive, very difficult-to-use typewriter to write simplistic personnel memos that got filed away in his personal files.
In other words, no friggin' way. And if this reporter is stupid enough to be unable to figure that out, he's dumb enough to be, well, an MSM reporter.
He says something insulting and expects us to stick with him? That is where I quit reading.
This should have been a MOONBAT TRIPLE BARF ALERT.
This from someone who complains about 'haters and extremists' as if he himself is not one.
The documents were never exposed as authentic. No claimed originals were ever revealed - just repeatedly faxed & photocopied duplicates. The originals could not be exposed as fakes because there were no originals to examine - which points squarely at them being fakes.
In her book due out this week from St. Martin's Press, Mapes insists that the documents are authentic.
Then, again, produce the originals - or at least an equal produced on vintage technology without special handling (the "th" required special effort on a document no sane person would expend special effort on).
The people who made the most adamant accusations at the time were anonymous amateurs on the Internet, not known experts.
How is it that anonymous amateurs could, with trivial effort, produce an exact copy right down to the superscripted different-sized "th" and kerning?
And yes, the Internet made it easy for known experts to weigh in. They, being extensively knowledgeable about modern and vintage printing technologies, explained in excrutiating detail how the documents had to be fake on a remarkable number of levels.