Forging Ahead

Wingnutters around the blogosphere are trying to discredit the 70s-era memos aired on 60 Minutes Wednesday. The full story (well, if you consider a story that only shows one side "full") is at this Tech Central Station piece:

A lot of bloggers are designers and computer geeks. People who pay attention to things like proportional spacing, kerning, superscript text and the other features of modern word processing. Guess what? A letter by letter comparison of one of  the purported memos with a version typed in Microsoft Word by Charles Johnson at the blog Little Green Footballs reveals:
 
"The spacing is not just similar -- it is identical in every respect. Notice that the date lines up perfectly, all the line breaks are in the same places, all letters line up with the same letters above and below, and the kerning is exactly the same. And I did not change a single thing from Word's defaults; margins, type size, tab stops, etc. are all using the default settings. The one difference (the "th" in "187th" is slightly lower) is probably due to a slight difference between the Mac and PC versions of the Times New Roman font, or it could be an artifact of whatever process was used to artificially "age" the document. (Update: I printed the document and the "th" matches perfectly in the printed version. It's a difference between screen and printer fonts.)"  

And this sounds so dastardly, and I'm sure wingnuts are patting themsleves on the back over their enterprising detective skills. I know that it was the lead story on Limbaugh today.

Except Atrios notes that IBM has been putting out typewriters that proportionally space letters since 1941. Here's the proof, from the IBM website:

IBM announces the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was further enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page. The proportional spacing feature became a staple of the IBM Executive series typewriters.

And you can take this entire forgery/non-forgery nonsense and throw it out the window. Just answer this one question: If these documents are so obviously forged, then why did the White House release them Wednesday night? Where did they get them from, if they were created by Kerry campaign operatives? Are you saying the Kerry campaign somehow got these documents into the Pentagon? How?

That's where the whole argument falls apart. Sometimes it's just so simple...

UPDATE: Apparently the White House obtained the documents directly from CBS News. So much for my stunning observation. However, according to a CBS News press release:

The White House distributed the four memos from 1972 and 1973 after obtaining them from CBS News. The White House did not question their accuracy.

So there you go. The White House isn't even saying they're false documents.

This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot anyway. Kerry continues to hit on the issues that matter most to Americans, and to leave this Vietnam stuff half a world and 35 years away, where it belongs. Let's fight the George Bush from 2001-2004, not 1972, shall we?