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| 2004/9/21 [Politics/Domestic/President/Clinton, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:33652 Activity:insanely high |
9/21 What would we do without the true believers at dailykos? These guys
are just as wacky as the freepers! http://csua.org/u/94w
\_ I agree. "Hunter" sounds like a freeper, but he's a liberal.
The characteristic in common is that the typical freeper and
Hunter here just won't acknowledge central weaknesses in their
position. E.g., for this dailykos guy, it's
http://csua.org/u/94h (the Post comparison of memos), and the Post's
reporting that all existing Texas Air National Guard memos have
reporting that all 100+ existing Texas Air National Guard memos have
been in fixed-width font, except these four from Burkett.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18982-2004Sep13.html
-liberal
\_ Not to mention that the signatures on the comparison memos
aren't even remotely similar.
\_ This is really embarassing, and it just goes on and on!
\_ They are just as whacky as Freepers because they point out
that Freepers are liars and extremists? Whatever.
\_ You don't think that "The right-wing are liars. They have
been liars. They will continue to be liars. It is part and
parcel of modern "movement" conservatism." sounds just like
a freeper, but with right-wing instead of left wing? Not to
mention such great explanations as: "Does it remain possible
that Killian re-typed them at a later date, and that his
inexpertise as a typist is responsible for the differences
between those docs and official TANG docs? Certainly." It's
POSSIBLE, but it's pretty freakin' unlikely, don't cha
think? You know, on the same level of possibilty as the
plot of "The Day After Tomorrow."
\_ The modern right wing movement is based on extremist and
easily disproven religious BS like creationism and the
Virgin Birth. It is extremism to point out this obvious
fact? The guy could be more tactful, but the truth is
the Religious Right's entire worldview is based on
fantasy.
\_ "Easily Disproven?" Go ahead. Prove to me that
virgin birth is impossible, and creationism isn't
true. Or heck, why not just go straight for it and
prove there is no God?
\_ If you continue to believe that the world was
created in seven days in the face of all the
evidence from the fields of biology, geology,
physics and astronomy, then there is no hope
for you and I will not waste my time. Take
a science class sometime. The existence or
non-existence of God is tangential to what
any particular sect or cult believes in. Oh,
I agree with you on the memos, btw.
\_ it was reformed in 7 days, not created
\_ You need to study up on your Christianity. In
the Hebrew in the bible it doesn't say "7 days"
it says "7 periods of time" which could mean
ANYTHING. People who literally believe 7 days
are probably idiots. Although, if you can't
prove the non-existence of God, ANYTHING
becomes possible, and 7 day creation is just as
logical as anything else. Anyway, the point
was that the people you're calling wackos are
using the same argument as the people you're
defending. You mock the belifs of one and not
the other, although they use the same argument
style to back up their conclusions. "You can't
prove it's NOT true!"
\_ that's ridiculous. There is physical evidence
which supports the Big Bang and evolution.
There is no evidence to support the creationist
view except some book that some wack jobs wrote,
and there are portions, like the Great Flood,
which are directly contradicted by all the
physical evidence as well as simple logic.
Shit, I've been trolled. -tom
\_ Why are they idiots? I say you're an idiot for
believing in your version. The early bible
stories are all ripoffs of old Babylonian etc.
mythology anyway. So you really believe the
Bible is some kind of elaborate metaphorical
construct that could mean ANYTHING? Or do you
simply apply that to things science disagrees
with?
\_ ripoff? nah, I would say they have the
same origin. afterall, abraham was a
babylonian, being from ur. different
books of the bible are written in very
different manner, so yes, parts of it
could be metaphorical and other parts
not.
could be allegorical and other parts
not. Jesus used parables all the time.
(ref. "dict ur")
\_ "7 day creation is just as logical as anything
else." No. It is not logical to believe something
in the face of overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. It might be conceivable, but it is
not logical.
\_ You've convinced *me* there's no God. Would you
please sign your name so I'll know who to thank
for completely changing my world-view? |
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| csua.org/u/94w -> www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/20/231236/983 New York Times CBS News said today that a former Texas National Guard officer had "deliberately misled" the network in its inquiry into President Bush's National Guard service by providing "a false account" of the origins of documents used to reinforce questions raised about Mr Bush's activities three decades ago. "Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," the president of CBS News, Andrew Heyward, said in a statement issued by the network. Hunter's diary :: The network said the former Army National Guard officer, Bill Burkett, had "acknowledged that he provided the now disputed documents" and that he "admits he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source." "Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman," the CBS statement said. "Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point." Mr Burkett, 55, whom colleagues call a stickler for rules, fell out with senior commanders in the late 1990's and ended up suing the Guard and its leaders. He also became disillusioned with Mr Bush, who he said was not supporting needed reforms in the Guard. The bitterness, he later said, moved him to go public with what he said he witnessed one night in Austin in 1997, while Mr Bush was still governor of Texas. Mr Burkett said that commanders, who were in touch with Mr Bush's political advisers, had left documents in the trash while sanitizing the governor's service records. An officer who served with Mr Burkett, Dennis Adams, recently said that Mr Burkett had told him of the incident "and that some of the things in the trash were pulled out." "I don't have the foggiest idea what documents of any kind he ever had." So it was indeed Burkett that provided these documents to CBS, and in all probability USA Today as well. Are they entirely forged, and, if so, where did Burkett get the information contained in them, such that Killian's own secretary could verify that, although she did not type the memos, their contents were indeed genuine? these four documents, while an ancillary part of the overall picture of Bush's Guard service, are now a story in and of themselves, and will be testimony, good or bad, to how modern journalism operates. It is in CBS's interests to determine exactly what Burkett's source is, obviously; it is in everyone else's interests to beat CBS to the story, and report it before they do. Nevertheless, is time for another summation, of sorts, because we have no idea how or when the rest of the story will eventually unfold. First off, I have been asked in multiple places whether I still believe these memos are "genuine". I will answer here, for the record, again: I have no idea. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of these four (or six) memos; I can simply vouch for the quality, or lack thereof, of individual arguments that they are forged. It is part and parcel of modern "movement" conservatism. And, indeed, they were lying in this case as well, and continue to do so, and will probably continue until the day the Rapture, space aliens, or tainted Big Macs finally come to take them away. cry was posted within hours of the original CBS airing of the documents in question, by a FreeRepublic poster called Buckhead. tracked him down: It was the first public allegation that CBS News used forged memos in its report questioning President Bush's National Guard service -- a highly technical explanation posted within hours of airtime citing proportional spacing and font styles. But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found. Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, but declined to answer questions about his political background or how he knew so much about the CBS documents so fast. "You can ask the questions but I'm not going to answer them," he told The Times. "Freepers collectively possess more analytical horsepower than the entire news division at CBS," he wrote in an e-mail, using the slang term for users of the freerepublic site. And MacDougald assisted in the group's legal challenge to the campaign finance law sponsored by Sen. The challenge, ultimately presented to the US Supreme Court, was funded largely by the Southeastern Legal Foundation in conjunction with Sen. Rather than a swelling of blog power, the original "forgery" charges came, within four hours of the broadcast, from a conservative lawyer who had previously helped draft Arkansas Supreme Court petition to disbar Clinton and is involved in the legal challenges to McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. And, by the way, God help us all if this is what passes for the future of journalism -- what some conservative, anti-Clinton, anti-McCain-Feingold lawyer posts anonymously on a far-right website. As we have shown in (God help us all, again) five separate posts, the argument for "forgery" advanced by Harry W MacDougald was, even in the beginning, complete hokum. From the original charges of proportionally spaced fonts came a raft of similar, completely ignorant charges. Let's pause for a minute to examine, however, the stunning ignorance of MacDougald's statement: Operating as "Buckhead," which is also the name of an upscale Atlanta neighborhood, MacDougald wrote that the memos that CBS' "60 Minutes" presented on Sept. Col Jerry B Killian were "in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman." "The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers," MacDougald wrote on the freerepublic website. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts." These few sentences of complete and utter crap, easily disproven after five minutes of online research? From that ersatz conservative wisdom, and a subsequent post on LittleGreenFootballs showing that you could almost, but not quite, match the document in Microsoft Word, we were treated to a deluge of claims that, from the quality of the arguments, could only have come from people too new to this world to actually have been around before the advent of Microsoft Word. Liz MacDougald, citing the original FreeRepublic post by Harry MacDougald. Especially if you shrink it down small enough that the differences become difficult to see! Read the comments to that thread for the hilarity of comparing said dead American ("St. Rather than a passing fancy, the celebration of the death of Rachel Corrie is a bit of an ongoing obsession at the site; And by "fabricated", we mean provably false with only the minimal of required skills. Did proportional type exist back in the dark ages of 1972? Could "centering" be accurately achieved on a typewriter? Could typists correctly determine where to wrap words so that they would not run over the margins of the page? And so on, and so on, as each argument was shot down, and new ones arose to assert themselves. Then we went from typeface to signatures, to what slang terms were or were not common during the Vietnam era, etc. After all of this, we are now left exactly where we were before. We know the circumstances they document did indeed happen, and we know, from sources that were around at the time, that Killian did have memos with these facts written down, for his own benefit. The contribution from the far-right websites has been exactly nothing. Racist sites like LGF, or extremist sites like FreeRepublic, will never constitute "... |
| csua.org/u/94h -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/daily/graphics/guard_091404.html Information Other Washington Post Co. |
| www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18982-2004Sep13.html All RSS Feeds Expert Cited by CBS Says He Didn't Authenticate Papers By Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, September 14, 2004; Page A08 The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves. "There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals. Monday's Question: On whose 1972 Senate campaign did President Bush work during his National Guard service in Alabama? John Sparkman Winton "Red" Blount Jeremiah A Denton, Jr. News Alert Matley's comments came amid growing evidence challenging the authenticity of the documents aired Wednesday on CBS's "60 Minutes." The program was part of an investigation asserting that Bush benefited from political favoritism in getting out of commitments to the Texas Air National Guard. On last night's "CBS Evening News," anchor Dan Rather said again that the network "believes the documents are authentic." A detailed comparison by The Washington Post of memos obtained by CBS News with authenticated documents on Bush's National Guard service reveals dozens of inconsistencies, ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques. The analysis shows that half a dozen Killian memos released earlier by the military were written with a standard typewriter using different formatting techniques from those characteristic of computer-generated documents. CBS's Killian memos bear numerous signs that are more consistent with modern-day word-processing programs, particularly Microsoft Word. "I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake," said Joseph M Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font. Newcomer drew an analogy with an art expert trying to determine whether a painting of unknown provenance was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. "If I was looking for a Da Vinci, I would look for characteristic brush strokes," he said. "If I found something that was painted with a modern synthetic brush, I would know that I have a forgery." Meanwhile, Laura Bush became the first person from the White House to say the documents are likely forgeries. "You know they are probably altered," she told Radio Iowa in Des Moines yesterday. "And they probably are forgeries, and I think that's terrible, really." Citing confidentiality issues, CBS News has declined to reveal the source of the disputed documents -- which have been in the network's possession for more than a month -- or to explain how they came to light after more than three decades. Yesterday, USA Today said that it had independently obtained copies of the documents "from a person with knowledge of Texas Air National Guard operations" who declined to be named "for fear of retaliation." It was unclear whether the same person supplied the documents to both media outlets. USA Today said it had obtained its copies of the CBS documents Wednesday night "soon after" the "60 Minutes" broadcast, as well as another two purported Killian memos that had not been made public. A detailed examination of the CBS documents beside authenticated Killian memos and other documents generated by Bush's 147th Fighter Interceptor Group suggests at least three areas of difference that are difficult to reconcile: Word-processing techniques. Of more than 100 records made available by the 147th Group and the Texas Air National Guard, none used the proportional spacing techniques characteristic of the CBS documents. Nor did they use a superscripted "th" in expressions such as "147th Group" and or "111th Fighter Intercept Squadron." In a CBS News broadcast Friday night rebutting allegations that the documents had been forged, Rather displayed an authenticated Bush document from 1968 that included a small "th" next to the numbers "111" as proof that Guard typewriters were capable of producing superscripts. In fact, say Newcomer and other experts, the document aired by CBS News does not contain a superscript, because the top of the "th" character is at the same level as the rest of the type. A CBS document purportedly from Killian ordering Bush to report for his annual physical, dated May 4, 1972, gives Bush's address as "5000 Longmont #8, Houston." This address was used for many years by Bush's father, George HW Bush. |