The Devil Made Him Do It - We Have Documents

In the media's misguided quest to flood us with things we don't care about, CBS has produced documents supposedly showing Mr. Bush getting all huffy and then the Guard being forced to swallow it in 1972. Except that now its appearing that said documents may be forgeries. From what I can tell, the story started whispering around on various blogs yesterday and got picked up by the mainstream media today. The only reason this story catches my interest is the seeming idiocy of the forgers and both parties desire to make us care about what happened 30 years ago.

I'm sure I won't get all the main points but the reasons listed that the memos may be fakes are as follows:

1) Typespacing on the memos is not consistent with a standard typewriter of the time. Only high end typewriters and word processors had this capability and were not in wide use, especially by the National Guard
2) Number endings "th" are shown in superscript. Very common now but almost impossible to do back then.
3) The memos are written on 8 x 11 standard sheet with no letterhead. Memos of the time were written on 8 x 10.5 and usually with some sort of letterhead.
4) The reprimand and comment were written as memos when standard procedure of the time would be to write a formal letter and then place said letter in the personnel file.
5) There is a noticeable squaring off on the end points of the signature of the commander which is inconsistent with how handwriting typically flows. The appearance is more of something that was cut out or pixelated on to the document.

There are probably more but that's what I can remember off the top of my head.

The biggest amount of egg on their face obviously goes to CBS. Dan Rather is said to "shocked and dismayed" that the documents may be fake and has promised to personally retract the story and apologize if the documents do turn out to be forgeries. Some might ask that if the documents are such bad fakes, how was CBS taken in so easily. My guess is simply that when you want something to be true, you overlook little things. Mr. Bush's records for the first part of 1972 are known to be rather scant and there has been much suggestion from Democrats that he was AWOL and it was covered up. Mr. Bush denies this but has not produced documentation that would effectively counteract this. So you have a hole and the first news team to fill that hole gets to make a big splash. Unfortunately it seems the pool may not have been completely filled with water in this case.

The bigger problem I have is with both parties and the media's desire to make things all about what happened in Vietnam. Mr. Bush's records were first argued over back at the beginning of 2004 and more recently Mr. Kerry has been under attack due to the swift boat veterans allegations. Neither story has any real effect on me in deciding who I am going to vote for and the idea that a person's actions in a job can be fully defined by what they did 30 years ago seems a bit of a joke to me. Now, Mr. Kerry has left himself a little more open when he made his swift boat service a centerpiece of his campaign, but as I've argued in the past, I don't see how that's relevant. I'm much more interested in what Mr. Kerry did as a legislator and the specifics of all these things he says that he wants to do or that Mr. Bush is doing wrong. But I'm not sure Mr. Kerry is going to completely go that route, although I may be surprised during the debates.