Wait. It gets worse!

In campaigning on Lord Kerry's behalf, Mainstream Media has apparently moved beyond bias and the simple dishonesty of omission into uncharted territory. 60 Minutes says it has the goods on Bush's Air National Guard service and has memos from the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian to prove it. Readers at Power Line offer a convincing line of reasoning that suggests MM is foisting forgeries on us.

The Globe story is itself based on last night's 60 Minutes report: "New questions on Bush Guard duty." The online version of the 60 Minutes story has links to the memos. Killian died in 1984; CBS states that it "consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic." Readers Tom Mortensen and Liz Mac Dougald direct us to a FreeRepublic thread post no. 47 to this effect:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's.

Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.

UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who have written regarding this post. Several have pointed out that the Executive line of IBM typewriters did have proportionally spaced fonts, although no reader has found the font used in the memos to be a familiar one or thought that the an IBM Executive was likely to have been used by the National Guard in the early 1970's. Reader Monty Walls has also cited the IBM Selectric Composer. However, reader Eric Courtney adds this wrinkle:

The "Memo To File" of August 18, 1973 also used specialized typesetting characters not used on typewriters. These include the superscript "th" in 187th, and consistent ’ (right single quote) used instead of a typewriter's generic ' (apostrophe). These are the sorts of things that typesetters did manually until the advent of
smart correction in things like Microsoft Word.

I did a little research on my own about the leading typewriter of the day, the IBM Selectric. The IBM Selectric II was introduced in 1971. According to Wikipedia:

The Selectric II had a Dual Pitch option to allow it to be switched (with a lever at the top left of the "carriage") between 10 and 12 characters per inch, whereas the Selectric I had one fixed "pitch".

By 1973 the IBM Mag Card was introduced for $7000 a pop. I didn't find anything on its proportional font or superscript capabilities, but even if it had them, you would have to ask yourself would an Air National Guard unit buy top of the line office equipment. Maybe.

Here's a link to the Globe story referenced above. Here's a link to the "Memo To File" of August 18, 1973. It's in PDF format. Take a look and judge for yourself.