Bush Texas Air National Guard Memos are Forgeries

[johnny karate]

My understanding is that the movie will not be in general release until Oct 16 in the USA, but has been screened at the Toronto Film festival and for a variety of film critics. As you stated, the critical response has been good, if not great. So who knows, I may actually see it when it is released to us general public.

It's only in limited release this weekend (not sure how many theaters, or when it goes wide). It's also up against Bridge of Spies, Sicario and the juggernaut which is The Martian for the same audience. All of which are (or will be by Friday) in wide release, enjoying much better reviews, and have much more buzz and better marketing behind them.

It currently has a 78% on Rotten Tomatos with just over 20 reviews. As you said, good, but not great. However, "prestige" films such as this rely on critical word-of-mouth to get asses in the seats. People may flock to the theater to see a movie with middling reviews about genetically-engineered dinosaurs running amok starring pretty young movie stars. But no one flocks to the theater to see a political drama with middling reviews starring a guy pushing 80.

This movie will fizzle and go away. No one will care. And the most noise anyone will make about it will probably be in this thread from someone who hasn't even seen it.

 

[Ziggurat]

The document did look typewritten at first glance,

No it didn't. It had an obviously proportional font, which very few typewriters ever had. It also had superscripted letters, also a rarity. And it had center justified lines, which is a pain in the ass to do on a typewritter, and so was very rarely done. But all these are standard features of word processors. It looked like a word processor document, not a typewritten document.

but Microsoft Word was designed to make documents look like they had come out of a typewriter

No it wasn't. It's supposed to look typeset, not typewritten. There's a major difference. Who the hell would want something to look typewritten when it could look typeset? And it doesn't look typewritten, not at all.

so a supposedly typewritten letter looking like a Microsoft Word document was not a silver bullet in and of itself.

It should have set of warning klaxons. It didn't.

They also didn’t have the original document to look at, but a low-quality photocopy, ruling out a lot of testing methods.

Plenty of testing methods were available. The famous overlapping GIF is pretty conclusive in and of itself, but other people engaged in very detailed analysis of the document, from noting the font kerning (which might be missed in a quick examination but is easy to spot if you know to look for it, is a standard part of word processors but pretty much impossible to do on a typewriter) to identifying the specific font.

Now that I think of it, I also found it odd that everyone went after Rather like a pack of wild jackals, but Burkett (the source of the memos) seemed to hardly be mentioned.

Two reasons: first, CBS didn't mention him, so he wasn't identified until some time later. Second, he's a nobody, and an obvious nutjob. What's the point in going after him?

 

[Meadmaker]

At 12am ET, Sep 9th, 2014, less than four hours after the 60 Minutes II broadcast, the conservative blogosphere came alive with allegations that the memos were generated on a computer and were therefore obvious frauds. By the evening of Sep 9th, it was the biggest internet sensation in history, and there were .gifs flying around that showed beyond a reasonable doubt that the memos had been printed in Microsoft Word using the default settings. Surely there was a central thread, a central discussion, that started at JREF before Sep 12th?

That is what I'm referring to. Not this detritus which is mostly about the aftermath.

Did you mean 2004 in the first sentence?

And "the biggest internet sensation in history"?


I was a participant in those threads back then. I assure you they existed. I don't remember exactly how many of them. I don't remember if those memos were discussed in the same thread or different threads as the various "swiftboat" allegations about John Kerry.

At the time, my take on it was that the memos probably weren't forgeries for two reasons. First, I assumed, incorrectly it turns out, that an organization like CBS would cover its bases and do a good job vetting their source. Silly me.

The second reason, and really more important to me at the time, was that the story wasn't worth forging. I don't even know why they bothered reporting it. Lots of people, including a Congressman's son, avoided combat in Vietnam in any way they could. That's news?

GWB was running for reelection, after serving almost four years as President, and someone thought something he did when he was 20 years old mattered? I was baffled as to why anyone cared, and I certainly didn't think anyone would go to the effort of forging the memos to prove such a thing.

 

[BStrong]

I believe the issue is more a case of confirmation bias than anything else - the memo's were passed to individuals predisposed to believe the material and they ran with the story w/o vetting the information.

It's similar to the ******** stories passed around about President Obama that goofballs buy hook, line and sinker w/o doing any fact checking for themselves.

Case in point, the RW'er that had to tell me that Obama was now allowing illegal aliens to join the military! oh Noes!

I had to school him about the Lodge Philbin Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodge-Philbin_Act

He'd never heard of it and was disappointed that the act was passed before Obama's birth, and therefor he couldn't be blamed for it.

 

[sunmaster14]

<snip>

Plenty of testing methods were available. The famous overlapping GIF is pretty conclusive in and of itself, but other people engaged in very detailed analysis of the document, from noting the font kerning (which might be missed in a quick examination but is easy to spot if you know to look for it, is a standard part of word processors but pretty much impossible to do on a typewriter) to identifying the specific font.

One nitpick. MS Word did pseudo-kerning, not true kerning at that time, at least with the default settings. An explanation is here. True kerning involves widths assigned to each possible pair of letters. Pseudo-kerning is just when a particular letter might have a negative offset, but that offset remains the same regardless of what letter follows it or precedes it, if any. Regardless, with MS Word (or any word processor), you get some consecutive letters overlapping each others' space. This supposedly looks nice, and might be something a professional typesetter would strive to accomplish, but would definitely not be something that a manual typewriter would do.

Two reasons: first, CBS didn't mention him, so he wasn't identified until some time later. Second, he's a nobody, and an obvious nutjob. What's the point in going after him?

What seems to be forgotten also, although not by the Thornberg-Boccardi report, is that CBS's document experts raised concerns about the memos, and Rather and Mapes not only dismissed those concerns but lied about them to other people at CBS. They also misrepresented the nature of the memos to at least one other person they interviewed (Hodges) in order to get his corroboration. This wasn't just a case of Rather and Mapes being taken in by a fraud. Rather, it was a case of them perpetrating one.

 

[sunmaster14]

Did you mean 2004 in the first sentence?

Yes, sorry. It's not often I have to type 2004 anymore. It's kind of like writing last year in the space for date on my checks. I think I was still writing "Year of the Horse" on my checks all the way until April, instead of "Year of the Sheep."

And "the biggest internet sensation in history"?

Up until then. I stand by that. It was the first time I can think of when something went viral and boomeranged back on the real world.

 

[theprestige]

The thread topic is about what Bush did or didn't do during Viet Nam. The memo was fake. His avoidance of his obligations was real.

Could you remind me, what obligations did he avoid?

 

[theprestige]

Someone generated an obviously fake memo. I blame Rove. Irrational perhaps, but I'm willing to reassign blame in the light of new facts.

In the absence of new facts, wouldn't the principle of parsimony place the blame on the guy who found them? The chain of custody verifiably goes back only that far. Attributing any provenance prior to that point is speculation without evidence. Under the circumstances, blaming Rove seems profoundly unskeptical. Conspiracy-theoretical, even.

Besides, what seems more reasonable? That a pro-Bush partisan would salt the record with anti-Bush documents that were obvious forgeries, in the hopes that anti-Bush partisans would be so deranged as to assume they were true and shipwreck their careers upon them?

Or that anti-Bush partisans would in their derangement shipwreck their careers without any such evil mastermind prompting from the pro-Bush faction?

Both narratives require a deranged anti-Bush partisan to explain the outcome, but one narrative has half the number of entities of the other. Keeping in mind Occam's injunction against unnecessary entities, I know which narrative I'd settle on as the most likely--pending the "light of new facts", of course.

What is your argument in favor of adding the pro-Bush partisan as a necessary entity in your explanation of the documents?

 

[Meadmaker]

Could you remind me, what obligations did he avoid?

Dusting off the memories, with the possibility of error in doing so, I think he missed some guard weekends or showed up late or something, and he was generally not a top notch, A-1, Guardsman

and...................does someone care? If so, why? I remember being utterly baffled at the time about the stupid junk that people would try to dig up during a campaign season.

I was reminded of an old Saturday Night Live skit about reporters digging up scandals, and they had some fake politician standing in the express lane at a grocery store with 11 items. I thought it was about that significant.

 

[DavidJames]

Yes, sorry. It's not often I have to type 2004 anymore.

I think some might say there was no need to this this time

 

[Jrrarglblarg]

Dusting off the memories, with the possibility of error in doing so, I think he missed some guard weekends or showed up late or something, and he was generally not a top notch, A-1, Guardsman

and...................does someone care? If so, why? I remember being utterly baffled at the time about the stupid junk that people would try to dig up during a campaign season.

I was reminded of an old Saturday Night Live skit about reporters digging up scandals, and they had some fake politician standing in the express lane at a grocery store with 11 items. I thought it was about that significant.

Missing drill is far more serious than standing in the express lane. A soldier or airman failing to report for duty is AWOL. Enlisted persons get a visit from the sheriff with a warrant signed by the first shirt, and they spend drill weekend in jail. Officers, maybe not so much - units, branches and decades all vary.

 

[Trebuchet]

Didn't just "miss drill a few times", IIRC, he actually moved out of state and never showed up for his new unit. Also failed to maintain his flying status.
This was probably due to his alcoholism, which, to his and Laura's credit, he eventually beat.

 

[Meadmaker]

Missing drill is far more serious than standing in the express lane. A soldier or airman failing to report for duty is AWOL. Enlisted persons get a visit from the sheriff with a warrant signed by the first shirt, and they spend drill weekend in jail. Officers, maybe not so much - units, branches and decades all vary.

Well, yes, it is serious.....when it happens.

Three decades later, it wasn't something I could get all worked up about.

 

[Trebuchet]

Well, yes, it is serious.....when it happens.

Three decades later, it wasn't something I could get all worked up about.

Nor I, I guess. On the other hand, his father used his position as a congressman to get GW into a unit that was unavailable to lesser folks. At the same time I, whose parents didn't have that advantage, got drafted. Then he let the USAF spend millions training him to fly an airplane he knew wouldn't get sent to VietNam, and ducked out of the obligation to do so.

Apparently, I CAN get worked up about it.

Back to the debate.

 

[Meadmaker]

Nor I, I guess. On the other hand, his father used his position as a congressman to get GW into a unit that was unavailable to lesser folks. At the same time I, whose parents didn't have that advantage, got drafted. Then he let the USAF spend millions training him to fly an airplane he knew wouldn't get sent to VietNam, and ducked out of the obligation to do so.

Apparently, I CAN get worked up about it.

Back to the debate.

There's no doubt about that part. He was part of the "chickenhawk" crowd for sure.

And everyone knew it, with or without forging any memos. That's what I meant when I said I assumed the story about the memos was true. Why bother forging them? To show that Bush was a drunken bum in his 20s whose daddy used influence to keep him out of combat? We need memos for that?

His daddy fought in real combat himself, and he didn't want to lose a son (he had lost one already to a childhood illness), so he got him set up in a guard unit. It's sad that not everyone had that option. My dad didn't have much in the way of influence, but my brother was nearing draft age while the war was still going on and there was still a draft, and dad did offer to drive my brother to Canada.

 

[Trebuchet]

Yeah. I'd have dodged VietNam if I could. I was to chicken to run to Canada when drafted, but had already worked my way into a non-combat MOS when my orders were change from VN to Korea. Guess I can't blame him.

 

[crescent]

and...................does someone care? If so, why? I remember being utterly baffled at the time about the stupid junk that people would try to dig up during a campaign season.

Part of it, if I recall correctly was that this was going on while John Kerry was being swiftboated and accused of getting his medals under false or exaggerated circumstances. So there was the perception that Bush was in no position to be critical of what Kerry did in Vietnam, given that Bush may have pulled strings to get a relatively safe sort of military service and then didn't even take that seriously.

 

[Trebuchet]

Kerry did his duty. So did I. Bush didn't.

 

[cmikes]

At the time, because the memo was such a clumsy forgery, I wondered if it could have been planted by someone in the Bush camp, for the purpose of defusing the issue of ush's Air National Guard service. No evidence supporting that scenario ever surfaced, so it probably belongs in the realm of conspiracy theories, and the people who forged really were that incompetent. Still, I haven't completely abandoned the idea.

It's possible, but I would doubt it. Texas and national reporters had been digging into rumors about Bush, mostly drug use and the National Guard since before he was elected governor in 1994. They came up with exactly jack squat. If there had anything to be found, it would have been found by 2004. So there really wasn't any reason for the vast right wing conspiracy to fake anything up.

 

[sunmaster14]

Kerry did his duty. So did I. Bush didn't.

Bush did do his duty. There was a definitive article written for George Magazine (which is long since defunct) just before the election in 2000. No new facts have come to light since then. A reprint of the article can be found here. The headline captures the essence of the story: The Real Military Record of George W. Bush: Not Heroic, but Not AWOL, Either

In fact, by all credible accounts, Bush was an exceptional pilot, and he did a top-notch job for the first four years of his service. He slacked off in his fifth year when he requested a transfer to Alabama to work on a political campaign. He wouldn't be allowed to fly in Alabama as the guard there didn't have enough planes of the type he was trained on to give him any flight hours. Accordingly, he didn't take his annual flight physical because he didn't expect to fly again. Despite ratcheting back his hours while in Alabama, there is no evidence that he didn't do his duty, and there is plenty of evidence that he put in the required number of hours, albeit in bursts.

Whether he got into the guard in the first place through his family's connections is another issue, although hardly provable one way or the other. It would hardly be surprising for him to get a leg up without anybody in his family having to explicitly ask for it. If you're the decision maker, and you have the choice between a nobody and the son of a Congressman and former Navy pilot to become a pilot for you, who would you choose? You don't really need to be asked.