Forged Documents!!

It doesn't surprise me that people would forge documents to make Bush look bad. It shouldn't surprise me (anymore) that CBS would go to bat for them. But this was so obvious! CBS could only have missed it if they are (a) shilling for John Kerry or (b) entirely staffed by people under the age of 25.

I learned how to type in elementary school, in the early '80s, on a manual typewriter. When I got really good I was allowed the privilege of typing on one of those newfangled electric typewriters with the ball; if you wanted a different font you changed the ball. I used copy machines where you had to encase the original in a plastic sleeve and make copies one at a time; before that we had to use mimeographs. I used word processors when I was in junior high and high school, and printed things out on a state-of-the-art dot-matrix printer. I am not a professional text analyst. And even I could tell this document wasn't realistic; the elevated "th" gave it away. So I'm guessing that this was done by some real young'uns who had no clue that typing was different before the word processor.

I also caught some cheaters once, on a take-home exam. What gave their exams away as cheats was the way they broke their work into columns. I provide space on the exam to work the problem; usually students will work in one column down to the bottom of the space, then break and go up to the next column. (Anyone who does it differently than that does it in their own unique way.) On one of the exams (which coincidentally happened to belong to the girl getting the better grade in the class) the columns broke normally. On the other exam, the steps were identical and the column broke at exactly the same step as the other girl's exam did, even though the work was only about 2/3 of the way toward the bottom of the space.

Little Green Footballs shows that the spacing of this document is identical to that given by the default settings in Microsoft Word. Kids of college student age increasingly believe that cheating is not morally wrong. So I'm guessing that this was done by some real young'uns who had no clue that typing was different before the word processor.

Surely, though, there is someone at CBS who is older than me, who remembers the era of mimeographs and manual typewriters. If so, then he or she was so blinded by partisan politics that he or she would latch onto this greedily enough to not even perform the most rudimentary of fact-checks on it. It surely doesn't speak well of CBS.