Page 1 of the Washington Post: Some Question Authenticity of Papers on Bush

It turns out Little Green Footballs was the one to point out the MS Word similarity. (Fox News picked that up, which is where I saw it.) LGF points out that the superscript th differences on screen disappear when you print the document. LGF overlays a modern MS Word doc over the memo and it matches exactly, even the vertical spacing and curly-q single-quote marks.

I'm convinced. These documents were not written in 1972.

I heard on this mornings news that FOX is having some sort of experts examine the fonts, so it's wait and see for me.

IBM Selectric Composer, with proportional fonts and replaceable balls. I don't know if they happened to make a ball with "th" between 1966 and 1972, but it seems likely.

Proportional fonts and 'th' superscripts were certainly available, but exact equivalence to the modern MS Word "Times New Roman" font would seem to be a smoking gun. The venerable Selectric certainly never had that, and the modern "Times New Roman" font is a TrueType reconstruction designed for computers.

The one thing I don't understand, is why not pull some more records that would have come out of that same Lt. Colonels office around the same time as the Bush documents and compare them all? Maybe there's privacy laws or something, but couldn't people's names and serial numbers just be blacked out and compare the rest of the documents? Also, there must be lots of guys still running around today who would have copies of their old paperwork that came out of that office, just like I have copies of my Dad's old documents. Why don't any of them go back and check their documents for the things they're talking about on the Bush papers and come forward with them either way?

Jerry Killian's widow and son don't believe they are real, saying that Killian was actually a supporter for Lt Bush. But that is just speculation and 30 year old memories. The ABC team does have some good points about the technical analysis of the memo.

Today's story

If you're going to link to LGF, I might as well link to a lefty blog's take as well:

<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/10/34914/1603">TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong</a>

Not posting this as gospel, merely for comparison purposes.

The funniest thing I've read regarding the authenticity. This may or may not be true. I know nothing about the military's inner workings.

on every piece of paperwork i've been involved with it is name and rank, so that does stand out a bit; but it could have just been an officer with poor customs and courtesy discipline.

Except for the order to Bush to get a physical (which does use the rank), these are mostly "notes to self", not official memos.

VSP, that's why I found it so interesting. It turns out that Charles @ LGF has a solid background in typography, and was the first one to point out the MS Word comparison. This is why both sides are required to understand an issue. The original complaints came from a righty blog and the righty Weekly Standard before they got to the WaPo. So I read Atrios and Josh Marshall and Kos and all their comments sections to get an idea of the other side before coming to a... well, a very educated guess on it.

HM, his widow said he never kept notes. The only half-decent actual explanation I can think of is that these were re-typed notes after the fact for archival purposes. But if they are notes and not serious memos, that explanation would not fly.

I can respect that. I'm not willing to pass judgement on the memos yet myself, but I'm too used to arguing with people who consider one side of the political spectrum to be Ultimate Truth and the other to be Vicious Slanderous Lies.

Nope, still phonies
 

The lefty blog screwed up. According to their own source, Monotype revamped Times New Roman metrics in the 1980s to better match Linotype Times Roman. So if IBM indeed used the Monotype Times Roman in a 1970s era typewriter (as they assert), it would NOT match the Microsoft Word font, which is based on the "New" Times New Roman.

The 4 is closed-top in Word and in the memo; I have no idea what they are talking about there.

If he kept them at work, I'm not sure why she would be aware of them.