A New York Escort writes her take on the new National Guard memos in Bloggers:1 Sixty Minutes:0 stating that the bloggers who have claimed the memos must be fake based upon the typeface or similarity to Microsoft Word versions done today have beaten the Sixty Minute team. Not quite. While blogers were on this faster than the mainstream news media, most of the so-called analysis has been partisan . . . folks looking for what may or may not be there and in many cases creating holes or wholes that don’t exist. While many bloggers are creative and bright folks capable of critical thought, many are just idjits with webpages who assume emotions and suppositions count as critical assessment when they most certainly do not. There’s a lot of strawman and red herring and faulty inductive rhetoric out there on both sides of the table that has been counting as analysis . . . sorry, folks, that horse don’t hunt.

Regardless, as Bibb’s Revenge writes in his response to Alexa:

Basically it means you will believe what you want to believe. The right will believe the memos are fake, and the left will believe they are real. Then there are the rest of us who don’t care and just want to hear about issues inbetween all the memos and swift boat ads.

The 60 minutes guys knew the memos would be controversial. They did what they could to verify and much of the so-called internet forgery finding is spurious. They could be fakes but some college kid with Microsoft Word certainly isn’t an authority. Rather and company also checked on the th which has been available on typewriters for a long time (I had one of a similar typeface in the 70s). Being able to simulate a document from the past via Microsoft Word does not prove anything (other than the flexibility of Word in being able to duplicate old documents – just because I can duplicate an old memo doesn’t mean the memo must be a modern forgery, there are other elements in the memo that point to it being genuine that were not addressed by the Word duplicate). The White House certainly didn’t call them fake, but released them as authentic as coming from 60 Minutes. In any case, those of us who have made up our minds about who we want to win and whether this candidate or that one is shooting to become the next Sauron, won’t be swayed by much either way. The White House keeps releasing new documents on Bush’s service and each time they say “that’s everything, there is nothing else” and then a few months later new stuff comes out. Whether Bush violated military conduct codes, disobeyed orders for a physical (which he refused to take for reasons that are in and of themselves interesting), or that he should have been sent immediately to active duty as per his service conditions, the illegal abortion for his girlfriend, the cocaine use, the alcoholism and multiple drunk driving convictions (including a sealed record in Texas so reporters can’t dig up the photos), his use of family influence and connections to the Saudis . . . this is all old news. If this stuff didn’t hurt him before, it isn’t going to do the damage now. The Kerry campaign started by keeping out of it as Kerry prefers to focus on current issues but the Bush campaign keeps re-opening that line of inquiry. The Vietnam war was a long time ago. It may still be fresh in the American cultural consciousness but it is old news. What matters is right now. Are the boys dying in Iraq doing so for the right reasons – as if any death can be justified – and are the problems coming out such as the prison abuses and the illegal hiding of prisoners from the International Red Cross in direct violation of a number of treaties directly linked to the Commander in Chief and his leadership or are these unrelated instances of lower-level folks outstepping their bounds and overstepping their authority. The economy, the deficit, going very quickly from the strengths left by the previous administration including a federal surplus to the largest deficit in American history which was created in the fastest time of any civilization on the planet, it’s a record breaker, the constant fear that Americans live in and whether we feel that anything will change . . . whether we are building allies in the Middle East and the rest of the world or if we are alienating more and more people, creating terrorists and enemies rather than defeating terrorism and creating friends and allies. I suspect that while the war in Iraq (which is not the war on terror) will feature prominately in the rhetoric, most folks will be voting based upon the economy and whether they feel any better off. In any case, one would hope that while events of thirty-five to forty years ago speaks to a person’s youthful character and follies, the real issues are in the hear and now . . . or, at least they should be. IMO.

More details on this at KOS, including the IBM statements that there is no evidence of forgery.