CBS has announced that Dan Rather will address the controversy surrounding the forged National Guard documents on the evening news tonight. CBS’ press release jumps the gun on one point, breathlessly announcing the existence of a typewriter that can do superscript:
At this time, however, CBS News states with absolute certainty that the ability to produce the “th” superscript mentioned in reports about the documents did exist on typewriters as early as 1968, and in fact is in President Bush’s official military records released by the White House.
The superscript issue is, as we’ve said, relatively minor, and the superscript that is found in one of the documents in Bush’s records is completely different from the one in the forged documents.
This is what I expected from CBS, however: pick out one or two relatively small points and show that a typewriter that satisfied those criteria existed in 1972. Which doesn’t prove, of course, that Jerry Killian had one–his family says he never typed at all–and doesn’t address any of the substantive issues surrounding the memos.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds watched Rather, and was not impressed. He says our prediction proved correct.
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