We have the tentative beginnings of an endgame on the TANG memo "forgery" discussion. From the
New York Times
CBS News said today that a former Texas National Guard officer had "deliberately misled" the network in its inquiry into President Bush's National Guard service by providing "a false account" of the origins of documents used to reinforce questions raised about Mr. Bush's activities three decades ago.
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said in a statement issued by the network. "We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret."
The network said the former Army National Guard officer, Bill Burkett, had "acknowledged that he provided the now disputed documents" and that he "admits he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
"Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman," the CBS statement said. "Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point."
...
Mr. Burkett, 55, whom colleagues call a stickler for rules, fell out with senior commanders in the late 1990's and ended up suing the Guard and its leaders. He also became disillusioned with Mr. Bush, who he said was not supporting needed reforms in the Guard.
The bitterness, he later said, moved him to go public with what he said he witnessed one night in Austin in 1997, while Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas. Mr. Burkett said that commanders, who were in touch with Mr. Bush's political advisers, had left documents in the trash while sanitizing the governor's service records.
An officer who served with Mr. Burkett, Dennis Adams, recently said that Mr. Burkett had told him of the incident "and that some of the things in the trash were pulled out."
"He never did say by whom," Mr. Adams added. "I don't have the foggiest idea what documents of any kind he ever had."
So it was indeed Burkett that provided these documents to CBS, and in all probability USA Today as well. From here, the mystery will continue to unravel. Where did Burkett get the documents? Did he, as he said, obtain them from another Guardsman? Did he pull them from the trash himself? Are they entirely forged, and, if so, where did Burkett get the information contained in them, such that Killian's own secretary could verify that, although she did not type the memos, their contents were indeed genuine?
Hopefully, all these questions will be answered. At this point, they must be answered; these four documents, while an ancillary part of the overall picture of Bush's Guard service, are now a story in and of themselves, and will be testimony, good or bad, to how modern journalism operates. It is in CBS's interests to determine exactly what Burkett's source is, obviously; it is in everyone else's interests to beat CBS to the story, and report it before they do.
Nevertheless, is time for another summation, of sorts, because we have no idea how or when the rest of the story will eventually unfold.
First off, I have been asked in multiple places whether I still believe these memos are "genuine". I will answer here, for the record, again: I have no idea. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of these four (or six) memos; I can simply vouch for the quality, or lack thereof, of individual arguments that they are forged. (Note that CBS itself is not arguing that they are "forgeries"; they are stating that they cannot vouch for the origin of the documents, and don't know either way. That's a responsible position to take, and probably one they should have taken all along.)
As I have said before, this "Typewriter" series was founded on one simple premise. The right-wing are liars. They have been liars. They will continue to be liars. It is part and parcel of modern "movement" conservatism. And, indeed, they were lying in this case as well, and continue to do so, and will probably continue until the day the Rapture, space aliens, or tainted Big Macs finally come to take them away.
The original "forgery!" cry was posted within hours of the original CBS airing of the documents in question, by a FreeRepublic poster called Buckhead. The Los Angeles Times tracked him down:
It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's National Guard service -- a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles.
But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.
...
Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast.
"You can ask the questions but I'm not going to answer them," he told The Times. "I'm just going to stick to doing no interviews."
...
"Freepers collectively possess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS," he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site.
...
And MacDougald assisted in the group's legal challenge to the campaign finance law sponsored by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.). The challenge, ultimately presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, was funded largely by the Southeastern Legal Foundation in conjunction with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the law's chief critic, and handled by former Clinton investigator Kenneth W. Starr.
Imagine that. Rather than a swelling of blog power, the original "forgery" charges came, within four hours of the broadcast, from a conservative lawyer who had previously helped draft Arkansas Supreme Court petition to disbar Clinton and is involved in the legal challenges to McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.
Connected much, you think?
And, by the way, God help us all if this is what passes for the future of journalism -- what some conservative, anti-Clinton, anti-McCain-Feingold lawyer posts anonymously on a far-right website.
As we have shown in (God help us all, again) five separate posts, the argument for "forgery" advanced by Harry W. MacDougald was, even in the beginning, complete hokum. From the original charges of proportionally spaced fonts came a raft of similar, completely ignorant charges. Let's pause for a minute to examine, however, the stunning ignorance of MacDougald's statement:
Operating as "Buckhead," which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, MacDougald wrote that the memos that CBS' "60 Minutes" presented on Sept. 8 as being written in the early 1970s by the late Lt. Col Jerry B. Killian were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman."
"The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers," MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic website. "They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts."
This is the fount of genius we've been arguing against? These few sentences of complete and utter crap, easily disproven after five minutes of online research?
Yes, actually. From that ersatz conservative wisdom, and a subsequent post on LittleGreenFootballs showing that you could almost, but not quite, match the document in Microsoft Word, we were treated to a deluge of claims that, from the quality of the arguments, could only have come from people too new to this world to actually have been around before the advent of Microsoft Word.
From the FreeRepublic post, the theme was immediately jumped on by Powerline, another hard-right blog, which was helpfully tipped off by reader Liz MacDougald, citing the original FreeRepublic post by Harry MacDougald. (What are the odds of that, you ask?)
From there, it went to Charles Johnson, host of the unapologetically racist and eliminationist LittleGreenFootballs site, who cleverly deduced that if you use a nearly identical font, of a nearly identical size, and with identical (standard) page margins, you will, lo and behold, get nearly-but-not-quite identical results. Especially if you shrink it down small enough that the differences become difficult to see!
(As an aside, LittleGreenFootballs is the site that celebrated the death of American citizen and activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed when run over by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to block the bulldozer from destroying Palestinian houses, by creating an award called "Idiotarian of the Year". Read the comments to that thread for the hilarity of comparing said dead American ("St. IHOP", etc.) to a pancake in dozens of (repetitive) ways, as well as various suggestions on ways to celebrate, including sending a certificate to her family, whose address was listed in the comments. Rather than a passing fancy, the celebration of the death of Rachel Corrie is a bit of an ongoing obsession at the site; a Google search of the site will direct you to a number of other posts on the subject.)
So, from Harry and Liz MacDougald and the brain trust of LittleGreenFootballs came a "forgery" argument that instantly passed the Drudge test of newsworthiness, in spite of being based entirely on fabricated information. And by "fabricated", we mean provably false with only the minimal of required skills.
Did proportional type exist back in the dark ages of 1972? Yes.
Did "Times New Roman" and similar fonts exist? Yes.
Did superscript "th" characters exist? Yes.
Could "centering" be accurately achieved on a typewriter? Sigh. Yes.
Could typists correctly determine where to wrap words so that they would not run over the margins of the page? (What, are you stupid?) Yes.
And so on, and so on, as each argument was shot down, and new ones arose to assert themselves. That's it. That was the crux of the argument. Then we went from typeface to signatures, to what slang terms were or were not common during the Vietnam era, etc. etc. And still, they were shot down.
After all of this, we are now left exactly where we were before. Maybe the documents are real. Maybe they are forged. We know the circumstances they document did indeed happen, and we know, from sources that were around at the time, that Killian did have memos with these facts written down, for his own benefit. The contribution from the far-right websites has been exactly nothing. Lots of noise; no actual facts.
Let's be clear about this. Racist sites like LGF, or extremist sites like FreeRepublic, will never constitute "fact-checkers" for journalism. This is for one simple reason; what LGF or FreeRepublic does is not fact-based. They seek to create facts, not discover them. They start from a conclusion -- that our Dear Leader could never, ever have done anything wrong thirty years ago in the National Guard -- and then make up assertions to fit those conclusions. And, because reporting hand-fed assertions is much easier then Looking It Up Your Fucking Self, they find ready enablers in the now downsized and still cost-cutting media.
We -- and by we, I mean not only we denizens of the Internet, but the "real media" -- at this point know the facts behind Bush's National Guard service. For an extended period of time, while other young men were dying in Ira-- I mean, Vietnam -- he didn't show up. He disobeyed orders, he sat on his Future Presidential Ass, and simply ignored his obligations. While Kerry, by way of counterexample, has had his closest fellow veterans coming out of the woodwork to support his election efforts, and a phalanx of tangentially connected veterans currently mobilized to critize him, Bush can't even name anyone he served with in Alabama, much less produce anyone to similarly vouch for his character. Hardly "Band of Brothers" material, that. Apparently, for Bush, serving in the military during a time of war was essentially a home-study course.
As I said before, I have been asked multiple times whether I still am willing to "defend" the memos. As I always have answered: yes and no. What is important to me is to simply make sure my arguments are as clear and precise as I can make them, and let the facts come as they come. Yes, I am willing to defend them, based on the absurd assertions the other side has set out. It is true, however, that the memos may at some point prove to be complete hoaxes. I simply do not know if the memos are genuine; at this point, nobody does. But I do know that the rationalizations for the attacks against them are utterly baseless. Whether the memos are forged or real has nothing to do with whether a collection of right-wing liars and blowhards simply declares them to be forged.
Some people have criticized other bloggers for their reaction to this story. I certainly understand the hesitancy to stand between the whiny, insufferable force of a Freeper attack and the immovable object of mainstream media, and so I can understand not wanting to be involved. But I also would have hoped that long before this story broke, we would have all been clear about the one truism when dealing with FreeRepublic, LittleGreenFootballs, and other far-far-right websites. In short:
Don't. Believe. Freepers.
If you are going to cite facts touted by extremist websites, or their conduit, Matt Drudge, you at minimum should spend ten minutes of your time to determine whether those "facts" stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever before begrudgingly conceding your point to them. I am a bit angry, yes; I am angry that, from our side, my critique of the forgery claims was nearly alone in the ranks of "first-tier" bloggers. Kos deserves enormous credit for front-paging it -- but was my research and rebuttal really something that none of the other sites out there could have done? And why was my rebuttal even necessary? What the hell in the history of FreeRepublic or LGF made anyone think they should give their claims any credibility whatsoever?
I hope, then, that my motivation in fact-checking the far right allegations is not difficult to understand. I cannot vouch for the ultimate authenticity of the memos; I can only vouch for the fact that the attacks on their veracity have continually come from fundamentally dishonest arguments, from predictably dishonest sources.
If this story has proven anything, it is that the mechanism of transmission of far-right rhetoric is stronger and faster than ever. We have watched, repeatedly, over the last week as various right-wing sources have tried to dredge up various notions of how Kerry could be tied to the attacks on the President; this will no doubt continue, fueled by the same sources as the original "forgery" claims, and propped up with similar quantities of fabricated "evidence". We shall see if they are met with more skepticism this time around.
Elsewhere in the news, however, the main story that CBS, the Boston Globe, USA Today, and other sources are reporting will likely continue to grow. Bush has now been positively determined, by documents his own campaign has released, to have not been deserving of the honorary discharge he allegedly obtained. The large and conspicuous gaps in Bush's records, and the not-terribly-coincidental 1997 sanitizing of those records by the Bush campaign and TANG officials, is very much back in the news, and serious questions are finally being asked about it. A comprehensive review of Bush's records by a retired colonel includes charges that those records have in fact been tampered with.
More on these events later, perhaps; for now, this post, and this series, is long enough.
Previous entries in this series:
TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong
TANG Typewriter Follies II
TANG Typewriter Follies III: Is it the Composer?
TANG Typewriter Follies IV
Tang Typewriter V: What CBS Knows
And you can see the single funniest comeback, from the right, to any of these posts here.