Bluemerle

There is no reasonable explanation for the laundry list of defects in the "60 minutes" memos.

Someone just couldn't STAND it. Couldn't stand that Bush was "getting away with it" because of the lack of contemporaneous documentation of what someone "knew" was true about Bush trying to get out of the service. So they kluged together the oral history of some folks that could never be proven without "papers" - rumor, speculation, hearsay.
And they made what they were lacking. They forged the papers. Because sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth, right? It's ok to do that, right?

The story will quickly shift now to who cooked up the docs and why.

I suspect a kerry campaign youngster made them - and was simply too clueless to realize that typed documents don't share certain characteristics with the word-processed documents we make today, and that a document made on a word processor can be detected. Kind of how I don't understand the inkwells and fountain pens of my mother's day.

Either that or it's a Clinton torch job.... I can't bring myself to believe CBS concocted them. If it was la grande trappolla, Rove Style, then I hail his lizard mastery. Dan ate the poison pill. A Barnes creation?

The laundry list.

Kerning - no such thing on a typewriter in '72 '73. No such thing on a non-computerized typewriter NOW. Case closed, btw. That's it. Game over, man.

No secretary initials - Killian, per his wife, didn't type. AND WHAT PERFECT CENTERING AND MARGINS for a non-typist.

Per son and wife, the content is incompatible with Killian's opinions about Bush.
General Staudt, who is named in the memos as putting pressure on Killian, was retired over a year at the time the memo was written.

Bush's address, typed into the document, is incorrect. Bush had not lived at that address for two years.

The PO box is odd, a natural sequence (34567) and may be a false placeholder number.

Proportional font was possible but unlikely at that time. It was not possible on ordinary office equipment.

According to multiple sources from the military, the format is wrong for the period, the proper filing notations are missing, the abbreviations are not the official ones in use, the paper size is not official military size.

Overlay a document with the same wording and format typed in Microsoft Word and they line up perfectly. To the KERNING.

The Centering and line spacing is not consistent with manual typing, nor are the right margins.
The 13 pt vertical line spacing was not available on ANY typewriter of the period - and it's only available on computers now.

Superscript TH was not available without special symbol selectric balls ( with an unwieldy process of removing and loading in the special ball - wouldn't be used on a casual, personal file memo) or highly specialized and expensive equipment made for special printing jobs.

More telling, numbers without a superscripted TH or ST are typed in the format "123 st" and "345 th". THe normal way to write those is "123st" and 345th". If the space had been omitted in Word, it would have been auto-superscripted.

And then, the annual medical exam Bush was supposedly being recalcitrant about, doesn't fit SOP. Usually the physical exam is done in the guardsman's birth month.
Bush has a July birthday, months after the date on the memo.

I stopped at #1. Add to this that the only defense CBS will make about the vetting of the documents is that "some folks who knew killian think he might have said something like that back then". I did note his wife and son disagree.

UPDATE - Ben Barnes daughter says she believes he's lying. And that he told her a different tale in 2000.