So now, after 60 Minutes II claims to have exposed documents that shed light on the missing year of Bush’s gaurd duty, people are now claiming the documents may be fake.
I have to say, if you look at the document, the case for them being faked is compelling. The type does look very modern, and who has known the US military to use anything modern for letter writing, when they were likely using old school typewriters as late as the early 90s?
It is quite convenient that the document looks like it’s been photocopied over and over again on a low-rent UPS Store copier, and then run through a fax. Clearly the original isn’t readily available… how convenient.
I do refute that idea that someone did this in Microsoft Word, however. That would be just too stupid. However, it does look a lot like this document was made on an old Macintosh, with MacWrite II software or similar, and printed on an Apple Imagewriter dot matrix printer. I used to use such equipment in high school, and the little misalignments along the top and bottom of each line are characterisitc of that printer trying to print using proportional fonts.
Unfortunately, the documents are dated in the early 1970s and the Mac didn’t make its debut until 1984. So, assuming these documents were fabricated, the person doing the forging didn’t try hard enough.
To be fair though, there were some high end word processors in existence back then that could have created this document. But, costing upwards of $20,000, it seems a tad unlikely that one such machine would be purchased for a field office and used for routine letter writing.
Nonetheless, I really don’t see what the big deal is about war records and military service. Both candidates served in some capacity in the military, and frankly, just signing up means they both have more cajones than I ever would. Drumming up witnesses who say your valor wasn’t so valiant, or that you missed a medical exam does nothing to compare the presidential candidates in the here and now. Since I hardly doubt that either candidate is going to go trudging through the trenches of a battlefield ever again, past trench-trudging means nothing to me in regards to who I should vote for this November. You could argue it means a lot in regards to character, but look who we have in office now. Do you honestly mean to tell me that we voted this guy into office based on his scene++ charisma? Oh wait, whether or not we actually voted him into office is still a matter of debate, seeing as from a strictly mathematical point of view, we didn’t… my bad. 🙂
