All I can say is, if the Bush-service documents CBS presented on "Sixty Minutes" yesterday really are forgeries, then boy, what incompetent work!
For those who missed the backstory, people -- from the blogosphere to the Washington Post -- are pointing out that those memos are typed in a proportional font, Times Roman, and such typography would have been unusual (though not totally impossible) in the early '70s.
As a teen type geek at the time, I recall jealously eyeing those IBM electric typewriters -- the IBM Executives -- that did proportional spacing, and occasionally I got to play with them. (But boy was it hard to fix typos with Korectype -- the characters wouldn't line up!) But it's strange to think a military office would have had one. So certainly, there's something odd here.
But the forgery scenario has problems, too. It's pretty damn easy to set your word processor to a monospace font like Courier. I do all my writing that way, in fact. (All right, I'm nostalgic -- I still cherish that monospace clarity, see?) So if these things are fake, then someone took an immense amount of care to futz up the papers and make them look old and get a signature on there that experts seem to think is a pretty good rendition of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian's -- then forgot to change the fonts on his word processor.
It's certainly possible. But it seems awfully strange. Furthermore, if you were going to the trouble of producing a forgery, wouldn't you go all out and really nail Bush directly on something more spectacular than the murkier, though still somewhat incriminating, details of these memos?
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