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Undertoad · 08-09-2006, 08:13 AM

I knew it immediately too. It's partly a "computer person" thing, partly a lifelong interest in fonts and typesetting and printing. You remember how documents were created and how they looked through history. How expensive it was to print certain ways.

I looked at it for about three seconds and knew they had been caught. Like my eyes had been sensitized to spot things - it felt at first like a "Beautiful Mind" moment. And then I proceeded to laugh my ass off for the rest of the week as various sides lined up as they looked to first defend the document, and then to say it was fake but accurate. It was great entertainment.

I wound up not voting for Bush... I point that out to say, all my excitement for this has little to do with the politics of it, and everything to do with the Internet, enabling this army of fact-checkers to go to town. And how news changes in the net era.

In fact it will be a great sign that things have changed when the lefty bloggers do the same thing. But they have bigger fish to fry - they've just caused a powerful incumbent Senator to lose a primary on issues, something that just never happens without a scandal.

08-09-2006, 08:13 AM	#10
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	I knew it immediately too. It's partly a "computer person" thing, partly a lifelong interest in fonts and typesetting and printing. You remember how documents were created and how they looked through history. How expensive it was to print certain ways. I looked at it for about three seconds and knew they had been caught. Like my eyes had been sensitized to spot things - it felt at first like a "Beautiful Mind" moment. And then I proceeded to laugh my ass off for the rest of the week as various sides lined up as they looked to first defend the document, and then to say it was fake but accurate. It was great entertainment. I wound up not voting for Bush... I point that out to say, all my excitement for this has little to do with the politics of it, and everything to do with the Internet, enabling this army of fact-checkers to go to town. And how news changes in the net era. In fact it will be a great sign that things have changed when the lefty bloggers do the same thing. But they have bigger fish to fry - they've just caused a powerful incumbent Senator to lose a primary on issues, something that just never happens without a scandal.