Bush - Air National Guard Memo: THE FONTS!!!

Just another interesting read in the ongoing soap opera saga about GW's service, or lack thereof, in the Air National Guard. Again, I don't really care whether or not he served honorably or dishonorably in the (T) ANG.

What I do care about is what future vision GW has for the world. If he wants to advance the causes of the capitalist class, then I'm with him. If he wants to push western values on the rest of the world, then I can live with that. And if GW is hellbent on bombing a few rogue nations into kingdom come, then I can't argue with him.

But, if GW is so stubborn that he cannot see his mistakes for what they are, then he should be removed from office. And if GW thinks that by creating yet another government agency to handle 'intelligence' will solve the problems of yesteryear, then he really needs to be removed from office. Dismantling the CIA or making them merge into some other supra-government agency is not the solution. Making government bigger is never the solution. Gee, for a Harvard MBA graduate, you'd think that HBS would have taught him that fact: government is not the solution to all the world's problems.

Quoted passage from research project: (PDF of Report)

ABSTRACT

The following evidence from a forensic examination of the Bush memos indicates that they were typed on a typewriter:

1. The specific font used is from a typewriter family in common use since 1905 and a typewriter capable of producing the spacing has been available since 1944. 2. The characters “e,” “t,” “s,” and “a” show indications of physical damage and/or wear consistent with a well used typewriter. 3. The characters that are seldom used show no signs of damage or wear. 4. The quality of individual characters is inconsistent throughout the memos beyond expectations from photocopying and/or digitizing but quality is consistent with worn platen and variations in paper quality. 5. Overlapping characters occasionally indicate paper deformation consistent with hammered impressions. 6. Critical indicators of digital production or cut and paste production are missing.

Implications are that there is nothing in this evidence that would indicate the memos are inauthentic. Furthermore, from the point of view of the physical evidence in the documents (excluding any rhetorical evidence or external evidence, which is not examined in this study) no amount of additional research on the part of CBS would have lead them to exclude the documents from their 60 Minutes report.