meeting area requirements
As part of our constant efforts to blend in with the blogging masses, here's today's mandatory amateur typographical analysis.
Catherine alerted me to this post at LittleGreenFootballs comparing an image of the new documents from CBS to a version ginned up in MS Word. Astounding! They do match closely. But I think it's a little disingenuous for the author to line the two copies over top of each other in grayscale as proof of the samples' identity. Times New Roman is a specific thing, you know, invented in 1931 by some guys named Lardent & Morison. When word processing software engineers sit down the design spec doesn't say "something that looks newspapery", it says "Times New Roman". Different examples of it are supposed to look the same.
But in this case, that's all they do: look the same. They aren't the perfect match that LGF pretends. Have a look here:
I just put one copy in front of another, changed the color, and lined them up as best as I could. You might expect scaling issues, the rotation of the scan, or antialiasing to account for the red bleed-through. And they do, to some extent -- fortunately the LGF folks have formatted the picture as closely as possible to prove their point, so we don't have to worry too much about making it an even closer match.
Now, like I said, it's close. But notice that it really isn't an identical match, and, more importantly, the offset is not uniform across the document, and does not increase linearly along any direction. Some words and phrases, like "pushing", "obviously pressured" and the date are more offset than other sections. If you bother to zoom in, you'll see there's actually whitespace between some characters and the red bleedthrough (and no, I don't mean the superscripted "th"). To me, this all implies that this isn't just a case of a heavily-xeroxed laser print.
So add one more uninformed partisan jerk on the internet to the "genuine" column. I'm just trying to keep the score even. I've got a sneaking suspicion that CBS's experts aren't as dumb as the blogosphere thinks they are -- and let's not forget, they had access to the original paper stock. And to me, the white house's failure to jump on the forgery bandwagon has got to figure into this debate somewhere.
UPDATE: An expanded, considerably more thorough and overall better version of the above is available over at DailyKos.
Comments
Ready to back down off this story yet? Willing to admit there's a connection between the Kerry campaign and the guy behind it? Or do you only jump all over minor connections when it's Bush-lovers and Swift Boat Vets?
Sure, I'll acknowledge the memos appear to be fakes -- although I still think LGF's analysis wasn't nearly as conclusive as they made it out to be.
I don't know where you're getting the Kerry connection. The source of the memos approached Cleland. That's the extent of it to this point so far as I know.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/21/cbs.kerry.adviser/index.html
I read it this morning. Now, your response may be, "So what, a Kerry advisor spoke to a guy. Big deal." But it happened just days before the story broke, the conversation was admittedly about counterattacking Bush, and I find it a little hard to believe that they didn't discuss the memo at least briefly. I mean, why else would Joe Lockhart talk to some noname guy unless he had something?
atrios has the full transcript
You're right about my response: big deal. It seems to me like Burkett was trying to push for attacking Bush, perhaps wanting help Kerry capitalize on the forgeries he was hoping to pass off.
Everyone seems to agree on the chronology: Burkett contacts Mapes, Mapes calls Lockhart and arranges to have him take a call from Burkett, which he does, for 4 minutes or so. There is no resulting action on the Kerry campaign's part.
It seems likely to me that during that phone call Burkett encouraged the Kerry campaign to go on the offensive, and may have alluded to the memos (although we have no indication of that so far). What wrongdoing are you implying Lockhart committed? Do you think Burkett told him the memos were fakes? It's hard to see how that would help anybody's cause. Do you think the Kerry campaign had a role in forging the memos? That wouldn't make any sense since Burkett contacted them after going to CBS with the memos.
I'm just not quite sure what you think the Kerry campaign did here other than accept a phone call.
I don't think the Kerry campaign did anything wrong, with the possible exception of encouraging this guy (which I have no idea if they did or not, but it's not far-fetched to believe it).
And, for the record, Lockhart is incredibly defensive in that transcript, suggesting to me that there is something he's not saying, though I don't think it's anything too serious. For that matter, it speaks volumes that this guy actually had a 4 minute conversation with Joe Lockhart. How easy do you think it is for some anti-Bush yahoo to get in touch with him? They talked for a reason.
But if you think the Bush camp is somehow responsible for the Swift Boat Vets (which you have indicated to me on several occasions), then the same can be said for the Kerry camp with this guy. That's my only point.
well, I think you have to be a little more clear about what I mean by "responsible". As I've said to you and on other sites (specifically, burton terrace), I don't think anyone from the Bush campaign specifically organized or ran SBVFT. What I did say was that John O'Neill, the driving force behind the swiftvets, is a longtime Republican operative who is clearly motivated by partisan hackery rather than righteous veteran outrage. And there are some financial and personnel links between SBVFT and the Bush campaign that are significantly more substantial than a phone call -- but that latter point is just hairsplitting for the FEC, not something I'm very interested in or think Bush should be chastised for.
I also said that I think the Bush campaign is responsible (as in morally responsible) for the swiftvets' claims insofar as Bush benefits from SBVFT's wrongdoing (lies). I said Bush should flatly denounce the lies and false implications being spread (and he did, although not clearly enough to really satisfy me). And of course he's free to embrace or ignore the parts of the SBVFT acount that are legitimate -- specifically, Kerry's post-war activism.
Kerry is similarly responsible here for refusing to accept political gains that come from lying to the public. Thing is, there aren't any of those here. He should denounce the forgeries -- but everyone knows or regards them as false, so it's hard to see how he's benefitting from them currently. The ballance of evidence on Bush's guard service still weighs fairly strongly against the president's account (or at least, what we can infer from his non-denials), with or without the Killian memos, so I don't think it's wrong to pursue that line of attack. Just don't use the memos as justification.
Strategically, I think it's a mistake to pursue Bush's guard service. It didn't work in 2000 and is even less likely to work now. But I don't think the Kerry camp's hands are at all dirty as a result of the memo forgery unless they somehow had a role in the forging -- and of course there's absolutely no evidence to support that so far.
The things you say about John O'Neill are equally true about Bill Burkett. A Bush-hater with a grudge against Republicans, clearly he is not impartial. Furthermore, there was more than one phone call. Burkett was in contact with Max Cleland as well as with Joe Lockhart. Not saying this was a Kerry put-up job, because I'm confident it wasn't, but the Kerry campaign didn't exactly shy away from it either.
You have long said Bush should have denounced the Swift Boat Vets ads. Well, why shouldn't Kerry have denounced these forgeries? I suppose it doesn't matter as much now, but at least Bush made a half-hearted attempt. Kerry made none when it mattered, when CBS was still defending a story that most considered indefensible.
My complaint is that you are overly partisan. When it was still possible to defend the forgeries, you did so. When they were exposed, you wrote nothing about being wrong. When Bush didn't specifically denounce the Swift Boat Vets ads, you were scathing. When Kerry didn't denounce these forgeries, you said nothing until I pointed out the inconsistency. Even here you make it clear that you don't think it matters.
You might think I'm as blind to the complaints of the left as you are to those of the right, but I think that's very inaccurate. I have a lot of serious problems with the Bush administration, and I will not be voting for him (and not simply because I don't vote often).
I think you shouldn't let the fact that you prefer Democrats blind you to the fact that they fuck up all the time too.
Well I won't pretend I'm perfectly objective -- I was rooting for those memos to be the genuine article, no question.
And I don't really see the need to post a retraction of the above. I'm no expert, and no sane person would think my opinion counts a whit toward the memos' authenticity or lack thereof. My beef was with LGF's analysis of the memos, which was not and is still not a good one for the reasons I outlined.
I'm not sure what you want. A disavowal of the memos? Okay, you got it. The right wing seems to feel more vindicated than is really merited by the discrediting of CBS's reporting, though. Nobody's about to turn around and say "oh yeah, I guess the president did fulfill his obligations honorably". That's not because of partisan blinders; that's because the evidence indicates he didn't, even without the memos. On the other hand, SBVFT were spreading lies that were directly contradicted by the best available evidence.
Now's where the claims of bias will start. All I can say is that for some reason the media analysis of this campaign has been reduced to "if there are two sides, clearly each has an equally correct position" by a paralyzing fear of being labeled part of the liberal media conspiracy, regardless of the strength of each side's position.
There are much bigger, much more important attributes of the candidates that we should be examining, some of which Bush can make a convincing case for his superiority at. But it seems glaringly obvious to me that Kerry served more honorably than Bush during the Vietnam War. One rogue democrat forging documents is not enough to justify saying "oh, I guess it's a wash".
BTW -- it's curious how there was no outrage when that forged photo of Kerry at an antiwar rally with Jane Fonda was making the rounds on Fox News broadcasts. That, to me, seems to be the valid parallel to the Killian memos: false evidence in support of a justifiable criticism.
I don't think you have to post a retraction. But I do think, if you're trying to make more than just a partisan attack page, that pointing out when you're wrong as well as when you're right makes it both more readable and trustworthy.
The thing I wanted was for you to be as upset about Kerry's supposed complicity with this yahoo as you clearly were about Bush's supposed complicity with the Swift Boat Vets. Clearly that isn't coming. I believe, in terms of moral culpability, both Kerry and Bush are equally guilty (or innocent) in these episodes. I always thought both were basically innocent. You thought Bush was guilty, but Kerry here is innocent. I find that inconsistent.
As for the honorability aspect of Kerry's service. I make no attack on that. However, there is another (very peacenik) way to look at it. Kerry fought in a war he opposed. He killed people he didn't have anything against for a cause he didn't support. He then used this to springboard to a political career. Is that necessarily honorable? Or do we, as a society, just find all American military service honorable without question? Or do we give Kerry a pass, because he didn't fully know what Vietnam was like until he got there, and he was just a kid anyway?
I don't think pulling strings to avoid the draft is much better. Personally, if I got drafted for a war I opposed, I would go to jail. I find that the most honorable way out.
As for the forged photo of Kerry at a rally with Jane Fonda: it wasn't just FoxNews that showed that. The New York Times printed that as well. And I never actually saw it on FoxNews. The one they played up much more was the genuine photograph, with Jane Fonda in the front and John Kerry a row or two behind.
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