"Doesn't smell very genuine, does he?" What is genuine? Is there some kind of litmus test to prove that one is genuine on FR? If you look again at my various posts, you'll see that I'm merely advising Freepers and allies to be absolutely certain. President Bush does not need uninformed supporters, with incomplete evidence, no matter how enthusiastic we are. If I were in a court a law, I wouldn't want any of the so-called experts on FR to be my lawyers. One small example: many Freepers claimed with absolute certainty that TimesNewRoman and Superscripting absolutely did not exist in 1972. Would that statement survive in court? Of course not.I replied as follows (some cleanup from FR's spell-check feature inserted):My job, and my company, are involved in testing very complex factory automation systems. So complex, that it's not always obvious what the system is doing. Thus, it's in my nature to question everything until all of the facts are established.
But maybe I'm missing something ... maybe the FR approach is to always go on the attack, even with shaky evidence.
You're phony through and through. If you're wandering around on these threads offering your words of "caution," you are presumably aware of the usual list of 40 or so areas where the seeming forger slipped up. Let me add another which I only saw today for the first time.No typewriter or typesetting machine of the time had a "center" feature. (What was Killian doing typing memos on a $3000 typesetting machine anyway?) To do a "center," as was done for the letterhead in two memos typed months apart, you have to type out the strings to be centered in a block, physically measure their lengths, work out the starting point on the page for each line, and force the print point of the machine TO said start for each line typed.
So Killian apparently did this centering procedure in two memos months apart. (Killian, who apparently did not type but had a machine more expensive than a new car, a machine no one else in his office used!) When he did this, he got the exact same results three months apart.
The results are so much the same that when you overlay them digitally, they match up PIXEL BY PIXEL. Not closely, IOW, but exactly. This using a machine that didn't have pixels.
Here comes the Twilight Zone part. If you use a completely different technology, Microsoft Word, invented much later, which has this feature called "automatic justification" and you set that justification to "center" and type the same address, you get another thing that overlies Killian's two memos PIXEL BY PIXEL.
But, apparently, you have to use MS Word to do this. WordPerfect, an otherwise full-featured modern program with the same fonts and features, won't make a PIXEL BY PIXEL match. Spooky, huh? I've been playing with this one myself.
The difficulty seems to be that it MATTERS what technology you use to produce a thing. WordPerfect, while "full-featured," was independently developed and doesn't contain the exact same code doing the work. Slight but detectable differences in algorithm create detectable mismatches. That, and the fonts look a bit different although they're both 12 point Times New Roman.
Funny, huh? But some old typewriter did the same thing, including proportional spacing to the pixel level. A typewriter nobody can find, since it turns out you can't actually make a Selectric Composer do what Killian did. (There are some around and it's been repeatedly tried now.)
Then you have all those other 40 things. Maybe you can dismiss each one, separately. One or two of the dismissals may even be true. The P.O. Box may really have been 34567 and it seems to have been used elsewhere.
But all of the improbable dismissals being true at the same time for all of the 41 items has odds of something like 10 to the billion billionth power. It didn't happen that way.
The alternative explanation ties it all together rather neatly. If the documents are faked using MS Word, the spectacular pixel-level coincidences become inevitable rather than nearly impossible. The same explanation also accounts for every other item of the 41.
So there exists this reasoning tool called "Occam's Razor." You don't seem very familiar with it so you might need to Google it up. Anyway, you could say it says "When there are two or more explanations that can be made to work, prefer the simplest." The folk saying of "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck!" uses the idea.
Applying Occam's Razor to you, we see that you signed up solely to express your concern that we are looking unreasonable for questioning Dan Rather's marvelous memos. In your judgment, WE have insufficient evidence, whereas Mr. Rather has evidently used sound and sober judgment in his journalistic professional responsibilities.
You're as fake as Danny's memos. By the way, you may have noted I've posted one of our exchanges so others can share the joke of your masquerade here. You may expect it with this one.