The following document just fell into my hands. It came from a source I can't disclose, but that's okay because it was authenticated by experts whose names I can't disclose. Except for the ones whose names I announced who now say I've been lying all along, but I can't be lying because what I say is always the truth, Q.E.D.

It's a page from Dan Rather's diary! I have a special, special source. Whom I can't disclose.

I'll never give in. They can't prove it, they can't. They can't, they can't, they can't. I'm the great Dan Rather, and they are trying to take my strawberries. I won't admit it, and they can't fire me because I'm the Great. Dan. Rather. Just because I manufactured evidence for something doesn't mean I'm not the greatest journalist who ever lived. When you're a Great Journalist, you're allowed to make the stories up as you go along.

I wish it weren't Kerry; he's a poopy-head. A real poopy-head. But better than Bush. I'm a Great Journalist, and Kerry is a poopy-head.

They say I don't look like I used to, but the boys still pay for my services. They know I'm the Great Dan Rather. A Great Journalist. Worth paying for the privilege.

I've been turning tricks in the Village. And Kerry is a poopy-head. And I will always be the Great Dan Rather.

Oh, and it's typewritten. Or maybe it's in Crayola or something. I have second-generation copies, but I'm only going to let you see my transcription onto this blog. But my Sooper Secret Experts say that's all you need to see.

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If you were watching the football games yesterday—or spending the day in sober reflection—make sure to stop by Bill at INDC Journal's place as well as Rather Biased, and Patterico. Also, check out this wonderful essay by Hindrocket at Power Line, who compares the new media paradigm to that we have had to go through with respect to security issues as a nation in the wake of 9/11.

Also: Protein Wisdom has several link-rich updates on this issue, one of which is both a linkfest and a hilarious faux-interview. With Dan Rather's ego, no less.

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blogging outfit is a T-shirt and cutoffs. But I suspect that's close enough.

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My prediction: if this thing goes legal, Dan Rather is gone before the end of this year. If not, CBS will wait. Then he'll resign in January or February of '05. Personal projects, time with his family, athlete's foot—something.

This document flap is turning into the Watergate of the Fourth Estate.

This difference is, the media is the message this time.

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Aaron Hawkins of Uppity-Negro.com passed away suddenly. Please pray for him, and for his family, if that's the kind of thing you happen to do.

(Via Protein Wisdom; Jeff wrote a few sentences that serve as a nice mini-eulogy.)

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found the Microsoft Soft Word feature involved in the Rather Hoax.

And Politicalities has the more advanced option.

(Via James.)

And yet one more: Jay Reding sends his version of Clippy to Rather Biased, where it displays next to the post on Bernard Goldberg's take on the scandal.

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scoops us all on a series of e-mails from the early 70s that prove Bush was AWOL from the National Guard.

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. . . And CBS should fire anyone else who actually looked at the documents it presented on its 60 Minutes segment. Forget all the subtleties that are apparent to anyone with even a light background in typography. There are two things that should have leaped to the attention of anyone, even a 20-year-old who's never seen a typewriter in his/her life:

1. The signatures on the real documents don't match the ones on the fakes. That should have raised some questions.

2. The person who created the forged documents didn't even use Courier. The shocker isn't that these were forged, but rather the fact that they were done in such a sloppy fashion.

At this moment I believe this is a story about the failure of the mainstream media (MSM), rather than a story about the election this November. That will change if it appears that somene in the Kerry campaign supplied these fake memos—that's Watergate-level stuff.

Your main links are here: the Weekly Standard, which has a concise summary of the major issues with the problem documents. Powerline, which broke the story, and Drudge, who is also providing regular updates. But don't just go to the main Powerline link; scroll the entire main page while you're there, because Deacon, Rocket, and Trunk are constantly updating on the forgery issue. There were 334 trackbacks to that main post when I was last there; amazing.

Here's my question for the rest of the class: 3.If these memos have been in Jerry Killian's personal files (that his family says he never kept) for three decades, and have only recently been spirited out without the knowledge of his family members (who say they know nothing of their origins), how come they've clearly been copied many times? If they were authentic, the paper itself might be yellowed, but where would all those specks have come from? After all, they've just been sitting there in Killian's personal file for three decades . . .?

Here's a summary of the problems that are being reported with the forged memos. It's meant to be a study guide only, as the story is still developing and the blogosphere is still doing its research. In this case there are far too many issues for any one blogger to cover, so I'm giving you an overview. This is what is being said at present (I'll vouch for the first three items):

4. The suspect memos are kerned. Not just proportionally spaced, as an IBM Selectric "golf ball" would have done, but actually kerned. (Type "To" in your word processor, and look at how the two characters get all cozy. A typewriter can't do that.)

5. There is a single "curly quote" used as an apostrophe, rather than the "tick mark" one sees on typed documents from the 1970s.

6. There is a superscript "th" that comes and goes. Micrsoft Word supplies these automatically, but in those days we were supposed to shift the paper in the typewriter to move the letters in ordinals around, and they didn't end up being smaller: just higher in relation to the numerals.

7. The term "memo to file" can be superimposed on the two separate documents that bear it. Very fishy, in two documents supposedly produced four months apart.

8. The paper in use by the military around that time was not 8 1/2 x 11; it was 8 x 10. Yet the suspicious documents have no lines around the edges to show they've been photocopied in a larger-format machine (yet clearly these are supposed to be copied of copies, given the degradation in quality).

9. Some have detected a pattern in the dots that are apparently supposed to signify age in the document.

10. Jerry Killian apparently referred to his unit using different abbreviations at different times, if we are to believe the suspect documents.

11. The phrase "medical examination" was apparently not used. It should be "flight exam," or "flight physical," or "flying physical."

12. The date 04 May 1972 is incorrect; it should be 4 MAY 1972.

13. One of the suspect memos appears to have been written on a Saturday.

14. Medical exams were supposed to occur by the end of the month in which the pilot was born, so there would be no reason for Bush to be examined at any other time than during the month of July (by the end of the month).

15. Exams were never ordered. It was simply understood that if the physical didn't take place, the pilot wouldn't get paid. It was something individuals were responsible for; their superiors didn't get involved in it.

16. There's not SSCI code at the top of the page, and that is critical for all U.S. Military correspondence. (Aha! Maybe Killian just typed it up at the end of a long day, like we do in corporate America when we sense a political shitstorm brewing 'round us that may get us in trouble 30 years later, after we've died. But Killian didn't type.)

17. The protocol for Killian to refer to his own rank was not "Lt. Colonel." It should have been "LC," or "LTCOL," or "Lieutenant Colonel, [branch of service]."

18. "Commander" is incorrect usage for that time. It should have been "Commanding."

19. Killian's widow, Marjorie Connell, says a) Killian didn't keep his own files; b) the suspicious memos don't sound like they use language he'd actually employ; and c) when he needed records, he wrote things down. But mostly he kept things in his head. Morever, d) he liked G.W. Bush.

20. Killian's son maintains some of the documents were forged.

21. The term "MEMORANDUM FOR" is incorrect for that time frame.

22. There should be no periods after the rank, according to the Air Force style manual of the times.

23. Ditto the abbreviation for Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS). Ixnay on the periods.

24. The phrase "not later than" would never have been spelled out. Only the abbreviation (NLT) would have been used.

25. Lt Col Killian's signature block is incorrect for letters from the 1970's. This document employs a three-line signature element; these were only used by colonels and generals in organizations well above the squadron level.

26. The signature element is placed far to the right, instead of being left justified. The signature element was not supposed to be placed to the right of the document until almost 20 years after the date of this letter, per Air Force standards.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing has more on the military irregularities in the problem memos.

See below for the rest of the linkfest.

more...

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WaPo: Among likely voters, 52-43. Some of this could be bounce, of course—but we were supposed to be living in an era wherein bounces were no longer really possible. At least, that's what we were told.

Via James.

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. . . the President used to drink, and may even have used drugs, in his youth. I'm shocked, shocked.

For crying out loud: it sounds like everythiing in the Kitty Kelley book is either beating a dead horse (the National Guard business; Dubya and booze/drugs) or is obviously made up (crooked business deals by Laura Bush, suspicious deaths, and the like). Some of it is reminiscent of that stuff Kelley made up about Nancy Reagan.

Even Dubya's former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, maintains that, no, she didn't confirm this notion that G.W. used to do lines of coke at Camp David. And she's no fan of the Bush family at all.

This is just silly. Any "news outlet" that has this woman on it as a guest is just discredited, in my mind. Go. Dig. Fact-check. If you find something true, then talk to her—but giving her credibility before you've done your research is asinine.

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I'm typing this on my husband's desktop computer. Upstairs I have a brand-new Macintosh laptop that I bought yesterday and haven't set up yet. It's beautiful and I love it, but I have a deadline on Friday and I will send this story in on that day if it kills me. I couldn't resist taking the new machine out of the box, but I'm not going to start working on it until I know I have a few hours to devote to being my own techie. ("Plug and play" only means "easier than a non-Mac," not "foolproof.") Likely this will be tomorrow, since I'm within a few hundred words, several phone calls (fact-checking, doncha know), and another several jokes of really being done with this story.

Tomorrow's also a deadline day, since the husband and I start writing workshops then (his in the morning, and mine in the afternoon). Fortunately, I'm only taking a chapter from my long-neglected novel in with me, and merely had to worry about retrieving it from my old hard drive and printing it out. All week, with my computer broken and lots of writing to do, we've been sharing his office. In a way it's been fun, like summer camp for writers.

It's a terrible way to earn a living, though. If only I could do something, like cable installations, that people are willing to pay money for. I've been practicing for having children: "you'll major in English over my dead body!" Hm. Maybe that's wrong: it should be reverse psychology. How about, "your father and I will be very disappointed if you go into a lucrative career."

We'll try that one.

"Goodnight sweet ladies, goodnight."

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Jay at Wizbang! discusses the virtues in having a President who says funny things, and doesn't take himself too seriously.

Has anyone, by the way, tried to parse out what Bush actually meant when he committed his latest gaffe? I believe that instead of OB-GYNs practicing "their love of women," he meant something like "practice the work they love," and got snarled up as usual. But Jay's right: Kerry's idea of self-deprecating humor is to discuss his hair, and when you reduce those jokes down, they essentially mean, "yes, I do have great hair." There's nothing self-deprecating about it. No humility in this man.

"Isn't it funny that I'm perfect?"

"Well, a) no; and b) you aren't."

Via James.

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Protein Wisdom compares and contrasts the various John Kerrys.

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Patterico continues his fine work as a one-man fact-checking team for the Old Media. Today he shifts his focus from the L.A. Times and onto the AP, which has been Dowdifying Cheney's speech from the convention.

I don't think Cheney was saying, "if you elect Kerry, we'll be hit again." Because I think he—and everyone in the Administration—thinks we will be. Sooner or later, AQ is going to get past our defenses. The danger Cheney was speaking of was of using the old, failed "law enforcement" model when that does happen, which only perpetuates more terrorism.

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I just found out about Blogshares, which grants any registrant an instant $500 in theoretical Monopoly money to invest in upcoming blogs.

Apparently, Little Miss Attila is worth $7,692.48 in not-quite-real money. Of course, I'm a "buy." Someone just sold 4,000 shares of me—a move he'll find himself regretting quite soon.

It's absorbing, because not only do they set a value on me, but they list the future (theoretical) value of anyone who's linked me recently. In fact, this almost appears to be a sort of alternative ecosystem—a way of establishing value in a still-developing, fluid situation.

This has to be the most fascinating computer game/stock market simulation I've ever seen.

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. . . is starting a syndicate of chick bloggers who support Bush, especially in light of his dynamite speech last week. If you're a chick, stop by and sign up. If you're a guy, go over and offer moral support. If you aren't a Bush supporter, rethink your position.

Thanks!

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Protein Wisdom gives us "9 French government excuses for forging Niger yellow-cake documents," including:

1. The US hyperpower needed to be taught a lesson, and France—well, France brings the lesson hammer!

2. Those were simply practice forgeries. Our real forgeries totally incriminate the Jews.

And so on. Scoot, now.

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at my house, at your local Denny's, and at Poliblog. Steven Taylor has an extensive Toast-O-Meter up with lots of campaign links, the latest on polls, and his own witty analysis.

Go; spend a while. I'll see you on the flip side.

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. . . we closed the campaign-trail loophole.

I think this qualifies as a pistol grip, even though it isn't the military style of pistol grip that many people think of straight off when they hear the term. And—joking aside—most gun-control advocates do not seem to want to allow transfer of firearms as gifts: more often, the attitude is that the transaction must go through the state. (That is why I didn't give my mother my favorite gun, my Chief's Special: I loaned it to her, long-term. I don't think California allows me to just give it to her.)

I don't know what Kerry's voting record is on transfer of ownership, but I'll bet there is a contradiction, here.

[If you copy the photo, please know that I'm not the one who named it "Kerryrifle." That was several copies ago; people shouldn't name pictures before they have their coffee—or if they are only piss-ignorant members of the mainstream media.]

UPDATE: Cam Edwards weighs in.

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. . . to stop by Kathy Kinsley's place for hurricane updates. Her big roundup is here, but be sure to scroll her main page.

Kay has now sent me a few notes, and though they are leaving the plywood up because of Ivan, they've reinstalled the towel racks in the bathroom. Towel racks! You could fill a book with what I don't know about storm preparation.

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