Can you get any more right wing than that?

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I have been following this issue via Instapundit, who linked to Little Green Footballs (that's right-wing, all right!) as well as Powerline (or whatever it is called) and a few more blogs I do not remember now. Oh, and the earliest mention of a possible falsification was on Free Republic (this one tends to be extremely right-wing). :-)

I tried to follow the usual left-wing blogs as well, but they are not particularly useful on this issue. A rather trivial issue, IMHO, with respect to the presidential elections. But an important and, unfortunately, telling issue with respect to the press corps and modern journalistic ethic.

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Washington Monthly and Daily Kos have good analysis and synopses. In short, yes, these docs may still be fake, but not for the reasons aired by LGF, Powerline etc...

a. The "unavailability" arguments appear to have been debunked (yes, there exist one or two typewriter with the right combination of fonts, keys, availability at the right time...)

b. the "it looks like MS word" argument is reasonably silly - given that they guessed the font right, of course the documents will look similar.

c. the rest of it is "he said, she said"....

I am somewhat amused by the whole story, and by the self-importance that right wing blogs ascribe to themselves....

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a1. Well, those memos can be reproduced exactly with Word. You claim that 32 years ago there existed typewriters that just by chance were capable of producing documents that are point-by-point same as what Word would have created? Not just same kind of font, raised superscript, auto-centering of text, same spacing of tabs and between lines - exactly the same?
a2. Do those models have NAMES? Or the debunking does not need those pesky details?
a3. If they did exist, what was the price of those advanced models?
a4. Were they hard to operate?
a5. Do you really belive that the person, who those memos are attributed to - would have an acess to one of those super-complicated, advanced, pricely models?

Here an expert opinion

Imagine if you told me that Bush is lying that he flew to Iraq for Thanksgiving, because just two hours before that he was seen in Fargo, ND. Would you be satisfied with a response, that there exist a plane that could have delivered him to Bagdad in two hours? And here I can even NAME the model - Blackbird!


b. here is something interesting (they are not just "similar"


c. No, the rest is just the opposite: on of the people who were supposedely discussing Bush's behaviour was a year and a half retired at the time, when those memos were claimed to had been written. No wtinesses, no experts who can confirm the authenticity. Rather would not even produce the originals! He does not seek the review! It is not "he said, she said".

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Yawn.

Cema, this is precisely why when posting a link to the right-wing side of the story, it is appreciated that you post one where normal people debunk their idiocy.

Arbat, if you can only be bothered to read LGF for your sources of information on this matter, I cannot help it.

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What's the point of partisanship here? Who cares if this is right-wing or left-wing or whatever?

Look at the documents. You are a professor, after all; can't you catch your students cheating?

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I will repeat it once again: the documents may very well be fake. However, typing an (almost?) identical document in Word is not a proof that the original is fake.

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Isn't it?

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well, it is not. I mean - if you honestly believe that 30 years ago there existed typewriters that could produce documents identical to contemporary Word documents - of course, then almost nothing can be proof. Do you also believe that quite a few people have similar fingerprints?

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Fingerprints are not a matter of belief, but a matter of science. (Well, so is forensic science.)

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Have you read Newcomer's article?

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Yes. Like I said, science.

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Similarly to Cema's comment about fingerprints, existance of such typewriters is hardly a matter of belief. They either existed or not. This is a verifiable fact. Or at least should be a verifiable fact.

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Well, untill someone actually produces a name of the model - it is all speculation about existence of a typewriter that could have done that. And where is speculation - there are probabilities.

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Well, you may yawn as much as you want to - your guy Dan Rather fucked up big time. You see - however often you repeat "ritgh-wing", it would not make forgery any more genuine. The sooner you decide it is time to cut your loses and admit the obvious - the less stupid you will feel.

By the way - here is an opinion of an expert: JOSEPH M. NEWCOMER, PH.D., and I mean - expert. Not some guiy, who used to repair typewriters.

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Come on, email_animal@lj is also a Ph.D, you won't scare him with suffixes! :-)

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well, I just copy-and-pasted the title from his resume.
anyways, I would presume that this guy is a better expert, then Dan Rather's second expert, whose qualification is "used to repair typewriters".

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I resent the "your guy" comment.

Thanks for the link. Interesting read. In my personal opinion showing that the document looks like one created in MS Word is not sufficient. One also has to show that there was no other way to create it. That part of the Joseph M. Newcomer's, Ph.D. discussion was more important.

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As I said - it depends on how high you think is the probability that two different systems - one mechanical, another - computer-based, made in different times, at very different stages of the evolution of fonts in particular nad typesetting in general - can produce exactly matching results.

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I always, perhaps somewhat naively, thought that the whole point of having a font was to ensure that documents written in it would look the same regardless of how they were created.

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Well, fonts evolve. Unless they are standardized.
In any case - we have yet to hear about some typewriter that was equipped with a font that exactly matched today's Times Roman.

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This is incorrect. A font name actually describes a whole family of fonts, and there are many parameters that are used by typographers to make a text look better. Kerning and pseudo-kerning... I will not even start about that. :-) But adjustments such as the line height, character spacing, justification and general placement of text portions are obvious and easily understood. Easily modified with computer, too; not so with a typewriter.

There is a relevant wikipedia entry now, I will list it in the main posting.

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Послушай, ну что за ерунда? Возьми эти документы и посмотри на них своими глазами.

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Well, sometimes right-wing people are, er, right.

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For an overwhelming majority of people most of the reported news are merely infotainment - as opposed to the "need-to-know" information because their actions (or inactions) do not change wrt the information they have received. Breaking all kinds of laws is ok for sake of entertainment, so why care about integrity (what's that, by the way?) and ethics in journalism? Reality shows are half-scripted and heavily edited; journalistic shows are too, big deal.

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No big deal when we talk about TV news, but a different matter when we talk among ourselves, isn't it? I am just sad that the "entertainment news" sometimes affects smart people who should know better.

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Why hold journalists to higher standards, than, say, elected officials?

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Why hold them to any standards?

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"entertainment news" sometimes affects smart people who should know better

Don't you see an oxymoron here?

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Yes, in the subject line.

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Ok, I'll explain: smart people do not let themselves be affected by infotainment.

And, by the way, "dead code optimization" per se is not an oxymoron, it is an example of a useless activity, cf. watching infotainment that does not, or should not, affect one's behavior.

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There must be another word to describe such people, "smart" is already used for a different purpose.

Dead code optimization may not be that useless if you are graded for that, or more seriously, if the dead code is not removed by later compiling stages. Now, there is a thin line here between joking and, er, education, which affects how serious one wants to be in the thread. For example, I was about to talk about the meaning of the word "oxymoron" but then realized this is rather out of point... :-)

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"smart" is already used for a different purpose

You got it.

Speaking of education, the dead code is never executed. If it is not removed outright, the variations in its size only cause subtle changes in the I-cache behavior and it is impossible to tell by static analysis if such changes will improve or degrade performance; in any case ever so slightly.

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Speaking of the dead code, consider a tight memory device, like a cell phone. But this is more like the new subj than the old one.

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