Thursday, September 09, 2004

Those documents that may be forged from the CBS show I didn't watch

Instapundit has this post with many links on the speculation about whether the CBS report on the President's National Guard service (or lack thereof) focused on documents that were forged.

Part of the scrutiny is on the superscript "th". Geez, I see that superscript and I think there is somebody who doesn't know how to disable the worst features of MS Word. Whenever I have to reinstall or reconfigure MS Word, that's the first thing I turn off. I almost wrote to Steve at Southern Appeal to protest all the superscript in that brief of his that was recently posted online. (Sometimes I'm able to resist my more foolish impulses.) By the way, here is the Southern Appeal post on this story.

If the documents purported to come from a law firm, then you would know for sure they were bogus, because most lawyers even now in 2004 won't use the Times font OR proportional spacing, for reasons that escape me. Those skinny fake-typewriter fonts, among other things, really don't fax very well (which is another thing lawyers can't stop doing, sending a fax when an e-mail will do). Maybe the U.S. military in 1973 was really modern in its thinking about word processing - which seems really unlikely to me, almost fantastic.

Of course, Bill Hobbs (an old favorite) and John Behan (a new favorite) are all over this, particularly as it reflects on CBS. What seems increasingly true these days that the networks and the NY Times have somehow crossed over to where the bullseye is upon them as much or more than it is on the politicians, and their work product cannot always withstand that level of scrutiny.

Beldarblog points out here that real live lawyers almost never come across documents that are not what they appear to be, and that's true.

UPDATE: Tomorrow's Washington Post has this article and the AP has this report on the controversy, which is probably kind of silly - another twist in the tortured path of this election.

No comments: