I just have to point this one out. Power Line, which I admit I read infrequently, has been blogging up a storm today about a 60 Minutes show purporting to give new evidence on what President Bush was doing in Alabama around about the time I was born. I'll let you read the whole thing, but the basic allegation is this: 60 Minutes presented documents, on air, that purported to be from 1971 but look like they were prepared on Microsoft Word.

Folks, this is just goddamn dumb. The mistakes--a use of a proportional font, superscript on ordinal numbers, kerning, etc--scream out 'this document is a fake,' obvious to anyone who worked in an office in that era. (For reference, there's been much blather online today about whether a typewriter might use proportional fonts. As one who learned to type on a clunky IBM Selectric in Huntsville, Alabama in the late 1980s, I can say that if such font balls existed, they were pretty bloody rare and not likely to be in a National Guard office.) But then why would Mr. Dan Rather, a man older than I am and supposedly a journalist, have fallen for this?

Well, says today's Washington Post:

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

May I propose that Mr. Rather be given a copy of another work of fiction, Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. Not only would he learn a bit about forging old documents, but he'd gain some hint of possible destinations for those who foolishly rely upon them.

Update: Only fair to note that the left-wing of the blogosphere has been doing its best to uphold the authenticity of the documents, most notably Atrios and The Talent Show. If it turns out I'm wrong about the above, you'll get a retraction from me. Nevertheless, I think there's a bundle of truly bad armchair research going on out there. Yes, there were typewriters--or more often, typesetting machines--that could do superscript thirty years ago. They certainly weren't common. The New York Times reports the latest typewriting suspect to be the IBM Selectric Composer. Still, I've only found one site that has a reproduction on a Selectric. But heck, typewriter enthusiasts are getting more hits than they ever dreamed of today.

I'll let my readers look through the comments on these entries and decide for themselves, but for the moment, I'm still in the "forged" camp. There's evidence on either side, but for my money, the preponderance sits with Powerline. The Composer was a typesetting machine, which seems a bit obscure for use to write standard memos.

Update 2: For those insane, or insomniac because of upcoming callbacks like me, you can try IBM's website for lots of information on the Selectric Composer. Including information on its typefaces and alignment issues.