On Errantry

Apparently, there's now some discussion amongst the blogosphere that the documents which surfaced this week referencing Bush's alleged special treatment in the National Guard are el-fako as they can be reproduced in Word to about 99.9% accuracy. These documents also do not have some of the hallmarks of early-70's typing (such as using something that looks similar to Times Roman and proportional typing- meaning, according to Accordian Guy, skinny letters like "i" get less space than big ones like "w"- most typewriters use a monospace like OCRB or Courier). Some people find the super-scripted "th" after 178 (I boxed it in the picture below) to be especially suspicious.



This is a graphic submitted to FilePile which compares a Word-generated document to the one produced by the Bushies on 60 Minutes (incidentally, 'CYA' means 'cover your ass').



Boing-boing is reporting that while the typing style is unusual it is possible for a 70's-era typewriter to produce this work through proportional Times Roman font wheels or balls (whatever the hell that means- I think I've used a typewriter all of twice).

They also reference two threads on Fark in which typography experts weighed in (allegedly, but I'll assume they're the real deal) and said that the documents do have some difficult-to-produce symptoms of typewriter generation (the "8" in "178" rides high on the line, "th" is in different place, as seen in below static overlay).



The Farkers also say that proportional type, superscript, and/or a "th" superscripted character was indeed available in the 70's (quote: "Superscript was well and truly available, even on mid-quality manual typewriters. I was born in the sixties, not the dark ages.").

I'm not sure of the actual mechanics of inserting a superscripted "th" from a font wheel or ball or whatever, but it seems to me this document is supposed to be an off-the-cuff memo (author abbreviates "group" "Grp")- why would he hunt up the "th" when he can just type the sucker "T-H"? I know the only reason my "st"s and "th"s are properly superscripted is because Word does it for me, lazy bastard that I am. Maybe I'll go hunt up a typewriter somewhere (a 70's Selectric, I guess) and see if it's really all that easy to do, eh?

Also in other documents it references the 178th as 178[space]th in a possible attempt to avoid the superscript function of Word...but if they caught it then, wouldn't they go back and fix this one? I mean, assuming these are forgeries for a second, it's not all that hard to fix it, print out another copy, and run it through a copier with the quality turned down about ten times. It's entirely possible to turn the automatic superscript off, too...

So really, then, I guess we're back to the proportional font thing and the who-gives-a-crap thing...ve shall see, then, von't ve?