Yes, it was a normal day. Except CBS is exploding.

Want to see a piece of history? Click here and scroll down to post #47. That's the place it was first mentioned on the internet.

Today was the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks. I spent time blogging, hanging out with my son, and my wife. I repaired some patio chairs. I went to the Home Depot.

It was a very normal day. And that is a very good thing.

Just in case anyone is wondering.

Yes, I know it's late, get off my case. I'm about to change into some work close and fix some vinyl patio chairs. But I have babysitting duty this morning.

I used Google Image Search to find "1972 memo". Down at the bottom right hand corner in the results (yours may vary) is a link to a document called bobmemo.jpg. I made a copy of it, you can see it here. (opens in a new window.) It is not a great scan/photo, but it is kind of interesting. This is a typed memo in a radio station from 1972 (I don't have any reason to believe that this is a fake - it is collected on a page of other radio station ephemera.) What is most interesting to me is that it is a fairly sophisticated set of formatting - the type is certainly proportional, there are some complex paragraph formatting details, and in the first block of text, it even looks fully justified. Just guessing, looks like this was typed using an IBM Selectric Composer. But the font doesn't look anything like the Times New Roman.

I just opened Word 2002 and started typing in the CYA memo, like over at LGF. Wow. Just wow. When you type 187th and the autocorrect turns that "th" into a superscript, it is chilling.

Every line break, every space, exactly like the document on the CBS website.

Seriously, these guys are just toast.

I am stunned that CBS is sticking by their story. Stunned. And the defense is just lame. It is certainly possible that Killian phoned his comments to a typesetting house that then printed the memos on a press. That would be a way for that memo to be produced, and if it just happens to look exactly the way that Microsoft Word would if you created the same memo, well, gosh, one heck of a coincidence.

But the point remains that they should have looked askance at something so strangely unlike other documents that have been authenticated from the time.

The CBS woulda shoulda coulda defense can be resolved very easily, as I emailed Jonah the other day:

This can be easily resolved. Show one other memo from the unit from the same timeframe about a different subject (alternatively, another original, not a copy, from Killian's file, since it might have been a personal typewriter or one from his office) with the same typeface.

All the other docs regarding Bush in the AF use plain old typerwriter font.

Ace gots something scary.

In a way, CBS's credulousness and outright partisanship has done a service, here. Had the forger expected any serious questioning and verification, they might have gone the extra mile. Just gone down to a pawn shop and picked up an IBM Selectric. Imagine what the discussion would be today had they done that.

Despite that silver lining, the dark cloud is this - the obvious partisanship of CBS made them manipulable. That's what the "Rove is behind this" conspiracy theory really says. If Karl Rove planted these to discredit the critics, then he had to expect that CBS would take them at face value - even though they were extremely easy to identify as false. He knew that their eagerness to damage the Bush campaign would cause them to ignore all the blatant signs of falsity, and then they would be shown to be partisan hacks rather than an actual news organization. In other words, the conspiracists are just confiming everything we already knew.

On ABC News.

And school. I actually had to do stuff today, so I couldn't keep up with the world on the forged document stuff. But here's part of something I put in Allah's comments:

CBS lapped it up because it was all of the smoking guns. All of the things that have been alleged but never proven, right there in writing! The disobeying of orders, that he didn't go to drill in Alabama, direct reporting of string pulling not just with Bush's knowledge but his insistence.

It was just too good.

And so they ran with it.

And they say bias doesn't matter.

Powerline Blog has a post about the latest stuff on the Bush AWOL story. They point to the CBS News site about it, and a reader notes:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's.

Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.

Now, look at one of these "new memos." And look at one of the old ones that has been used in previous stories.

The new docs are forgeries, and CBS News is passing them on uncritically.

P.S. to the hoaxsters - nice try, but if you write a "CYA" memo, you don't put CYA in the subject line.

UPDATE: You can see all those docs used to previously call the President's service into question here. All in typewriter font.

UPDATE II: Here's another document signed by Killian - typewriter font. As are all of the other documents from that unit that have been released.

No, not this one, the first one, December 29, 2002.

World War III

Here's the lineup.

Good guys: US, Israel, Russia, and India.

Bad guys: Every majority Muslim nation in the world save Turkey.

I don't hold with the WWIII=The Cold War formulation, making the War on Terror (WOT) WWIV. This is truly the next World War, and we have really just gotten started.

I think Russia just figured it out.

I mention Cofer Black in a post below, and something that Bob Woodward writes about him is that he looks a lot like Karl Rove. You be the judge.

Cofer Black	Karl Rove

Allah points to the Northeast Intelligence Network website in a post about rumors of what happened at LAX a couple of days ago. Basically, Allah's post says that there are rumors that there was really an IED, but that since NIN is hinting the same thing, it can't be true.

NIN posts a picture of a suitcase that is reportedly from LAX:

And then posts the following:

6 September 2004 -- HQ INTEL ALERT EXCLUSIVE: What happened to this piece of luggage on Saturday when it went through LAX??? Why did items of clothing show clear signs of charring?

Well, because bomb squad folks use explosive actuated remote tools to disarm IED's. None of that cut the red wire stuff, that's totally Hollywood. When they say don't leave your luggage unattended, it's because they haul it off and "blow it up." Not really, but it will end up looking like the above.

Evidently someone had reason to believe that there was an IED in the bag, or it was left unattended. And so they shot it with something like this:

So in answer to the NIN's question, what happened was the bomb squad remotely opened the bag, and the device they used caused charring of the clothes inside. That does not answer the question of whether an IED was actually in the bag, but anyone who saw the clothes to know they were charred would have seen evidence of an explosive device.

I think the lesson here, beyond Allah's point that NIN is the world's most alarmist website, is not to leave your luggage unattended.

But first thing I thought of when I saw it:

UPDATE: As Erich von Daniken Andrew Tomas says, We Are Not the First.

Rush Limbaugh dating some CNN news babe?

In Iraq, we may have captured al Douri. This has been falsely reported before, and I saw it on the Fox website 10 minutes ago and now it is gone.

Cofer Black says we are closing in on bin Laden. Again, this has been reported in the past, too, and I still think he is dead. But I'll take being wrong on that if we bring him in.

By the way, Cofer Black is the guy who said he would bring the President bin Laden's head in a box, which is why that was in my recommended acceptance speech.