In case you hadn’t heard all the controversy about the alleged National Guard memos, the short version is that 60 Minutes did a piece last Wednesday about Bush’s National Guard service, and as part of their evidence that Bush shirked his duties, they presented four newly-obtained memos from Jerry Killian, Bush’s commanding officer at the time. You can read the whole article here, but basically, the memos said things like, “I’ve been pressured to sugar-coat Bush’s military record,” and other testimony that makes Bush look really bad.
The problem is, a bunch of people on the internet got together and found that if you typed the memo in Microsoft Word with the default font (Times New Roman) and settings (margin, spacing, etc.), it matches exactly with the memo from 1972. But since most typewriters in 1972 did not use proportionally-spaced fonts, or superscripting, or curly quotes, it seems extremely unlikely that these documents were from 1972, and more likely that they were poor forgeries by someone using Microsoft Word, who wasn’t even smart enough to use a monospaced font and turn off curly quotes.
So CBS is standing by their report, despite the preponderance of evidence that the documents were forged. I found a very convincing argument here, from someone with vast amounts of knowledge about desktop publishing, that seems to prove conclusively that they were forged. Interesting reading.
