campaign 2004 and document analysis

So, documents were made public that seem to indicate some nefarious goings on with regard to Bush’s time in the National Guard. Then people began to question the authenticity of these documents. You know, you think they’d ask those of us who do work in the history of writing, reading, and publishing to help out with these issues, but no…

  • From Little Green Footballs: “Bush Guard Documents: Forged“:
  • I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoftís Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date ì18 August 1973,î then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

    And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as ìauthentic.î

  • From the Daily Kos: “ TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong“:

    You see, a “typeface” doesn’t just consist of the shape of the letters. It also is a set of rules about the size of the letters in different point sizes, the width of those letters, and the spacing between them. These are all designed in as part of the font, by the designer. Since Microsoft Word was designed to include popular and very-long-used typefaces, it is hardly a surprise that those typefaces, in Microsoft Word, would look similar to, er, themselves, on a typewriter or other publishing device. That’s the point of typefaces; to have a uniform look across all publishing devices. To look the same. You could use the same typeface in, for example, OpenOffice, and if it’s the same font, surprise-surprise, it will look the same.

    So kudos on discovering fonts, freeper guy.

I guess Plato was onto something when he had Socrates say this:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

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  1. The Hunting of the President

    Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry’s The Hunting of the President (IMDB), a documentary about “the ten-year campaign to destroy Bill Clinton,” has been lost in the shuffle of the many other fine documentaries that have appeared in theaters this year….

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