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Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Funniest line I've heard today: Oh yes, we're evenhanded at CBS News
From the first line of the transcript of Gunga Dan's defense Monday night on the "CBS Evening News" (boldface mine):
Besides checking on John Kerry's service record, CBS has been checking president Bush's service in the national guard ....
Words fail me — but fortunately, lest I explode, my "guffawing" function still works fine.
Second place goes to John Podhoretz's column in Tuesday's NYP entitled "CBS Forges Ahead."
Posted by Beldar at 04:59 AM in Humor, Mainstream Media, Politics (2006 & earlier) | Permalink
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Comments
(1) Pedro Correia made the following comment | Sep 14, 2004 6:54:41 AM | Permalink
CBS won't retract.
Have you seen this: http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200409131046.asp
(2) J_Crater made the following comment | Sep 14, 2004 12:41:07 PM | Permalink
What would you expect for the most significantgreatest forgery scandal since the Salamander Letter,
(3) Todd made the following comment | Sep 14, 2004 2:56:23 PM | Permalink
The world's most famous typewriter repairman has now morphed into a "document expert" in CBS' latest story on Rathergate. I almost feel sorry for CBS. I mean, Glennon's now a "document expert," Mately authenticated the documents and then he didn't, the documents "could" have been produced in the 70s, Staudt is a "mythic figure" in the Texas Air National Guard and on and on. Don't they see how silly all of this is?
A first year attorney would annihilate these clowns on cross examination. No, wait. They'd be barred from ever testifying at trial. Never mind.
(4) Bruce made the following comment | Sep 14, 2004 3:37:38 PM | Permalink
Mr. Glennon can make all the claims he wants to about IBM typewriters at the time. However, I used to own one (IBM Selectric II). For the time, it was a pretty advanced and well perfoming typewriter.
I don't recall any proportional font capability. I also don't recall any ability to superscript letters without changing the typing ball.
However, the one thing that I positively remember is that it had no capability (without human assistance) to perfectly center text. How the hell can a typewriter know how many letters need to be centered?
In order to do that on an 8.5" standard piece of typing paper, you had to tabulate the typewriter to the 'exact' 4.25" position (assuming you had the paper feed in the exact postion). Then you had to count the letters and spaces in each line to be centered and backspace one half of them accordingly.
For instance, if the title line was "All the president's men", it contains 23 letters and spaces. The typist would then backspace either 11 or 12 spaces in order to put the phrase in the center of the paper. This would have to be repeated for every line which required centering.
Especially with lines containing an odd number of letters and spaces, this was virtually impossible to accomplish without a great deal of trial and error....and it still would never be perfect.
It simply is not possible that the CBS documents are "perfectly" centered on each of these supposed documents. No rational person would believe that.
Dan Rather and CBS owe the president an apology and an explanation to the American people they were clearly attempting to deceive.
(5) Steven Jens made the following comment | Sep 15, 2004 2:09:23 AM | Permalink
No, Bruce, the Selectric II won't cut it. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the proportional font and the superscript eliminate pretty much everything except the Selectric Composer (even without considering the centering). And Shape of Days eliminated the Selectric Composer (which would have been awfully expensive for an Air Force Reserve colonel, even if it could do the job).
(6) Sully made the following comment | Sep 15, 2004 9:08:25 AM | Permalink
Yeah, It's too bad they are not as even handed as Fox News. Give me a break.
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