They say that even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally, so Fox is entitled to an occasional slip, when it lets the truth actually get out.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

The Rather story is actually rather (pun intended) more complicated. I think it started when a college-age Karl Rove was working for Chuck Colson and the Nixon Dirty Tricks squad. Nixon's hatred for JFK transcended his assassination and Nixon was always trying to find ways to smear his reputation. One plan that Howard Hunt and others tried to implement was to forge a document that, if true, would have implicated Kennedy with some secret agreements with Fidel Castro. They leaked this memo, but it was discovered to be a fake very quickly. They were stupid enough to create it on a version of the White House letterhead that hadn't been created until years after Kennedy's death.

I think that Rove took away from that the lesson that even the truth can be made to seem like a lie if a faked document is created and then immediately discredited. It doesn't matter what the document said, or whether there was an original document somewhere that this was a copy of, the proof of forgery would forever brand the content of the document as false.

In this case, the six documents were purported to be documents dictated by the late Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian about Lt. Bush's misdoings in the Texas Air National Guard. The original documents had been typed up by Killian's secretary, who was interviewed during the scandal, but basically ignored. She stated that the contents of the documents were just as she had remembered them when she originally typed them up, but the hard-copy documents didn't look like the originals. Killian's son Gary also identified some of the documents as containing truths about Killian's thoughts on Bush.

Just hours after Rather held them up to a camera on the CBS news, a blogger on the right-wing FreeRepublic reported that he had recognized the typeface on these documents as Microsoft Word's TrueType version of the Times Roman font.

Having written page layout and typography software, even creating typefaces, I can assert absolutely that even the creator of the particular font in question would not be able to recognize it that precisely from a low-resolution glance at the documents on a TV screen. First of all, there are scores of fonts that look indistinguishable from Microsoft's Times Roman to anybody but a typographic expert. And that even an expert would have to examine the documents carefully under magnification, measuring kerning and other characteristics to determine what font was actually used.

Yet, here's this blogger on FreeRepublic (who was later identified as a lawyer and Republican Party operative from Texas) who made an impossible identification with inadequate information to do so. And he did it just hours after the documents were shown on TV for the first time. Soon bloggers on other right-wing sites like Powerline and Little Green Footballs were making exactly the same claim.

It just doesn't pass the smell test.

One argument was that no normal typewriter had proportional spacing at the time the documents were supposed to be typed, but this was false. The IBM Selectric Elite with a Times Roman typeface used proportional spacing. I've seen samples of both and I dare the original bloggers to identify under the same viewing conditions which document was typed with the IBM Selectric Elite, or used Microsoft Times Roman (or for that matter, any of dozens of Times Roman clones, like Book Antiqua, Georgia, Palatino Linotype, Sylfaen, and others).

cont..

...cont

However, I think that Rather got punked by one of Rove's typical diabolical dirty tricks. Take real evidence that made several damning points:

1) Bush was ordered to report for a flight physical in 1972 (the first year that drug testing was included) and refused the direct order.

2) A note that Killian had grounded Bush because of the refusal to take the physical and because of "failure to perform to USAF/TexANG standards.

3) An indication that Killian wanted a flight inquiry board to be convened to investigate Bush's refusal to take the physical.

4) Notes of a telephone conversation between Killian and Bush in which Bush told Killian he didn't have time to attend ANG duties because he was working in the Senate campaign for Winton Blount in Alabama.

5) A note in which Killian claimed he was being pressured from above to improve Bush's grades on his yearly evaluation. He said he was being pushed to 'sugarcoat' Bush's performance records with marks Bush had not earned.

[We know that he didn't take that physical or any subsequent one, and was grounded for the remainder of his service, and we know he spent a year in Alabama campaigning for Blount, during which the only 'evidence' that Bush was going to ANG meetings was Bush's own submission of statements requesting payment for various meetings. There never was any actual proof in the Alabama ANG records that Bush was ever on base there.]

and create a provably forged copy of the real thing.

So, given that this would have blown Bush's campaign out of the water and was already creating a stir in the newspapers, Rove remembered the discrediting of the forged JFK memo and realized you could discredit truth as easily as fiction by using the same technique. So, I think somebody on his staff recreated the exact memos that Killian had originally dictated (and we have his secretary's word that the contents were identical to what she had originally typed). But, they created the new documents in a format that did not exist at the time the originals were typed.

Then they contrived through several shady characters, Bill Burkett and Ben Barnes, to pass the forgeries to CBS. Once Rather showed them on TV, several Republican operatives, already primed with the technical details about how to prove the documents forgeries began blogging that they "just happened to identify the typeface as Microsoft TrueType Times Roman."

Once the documents themselves were labeled forgeries, the charges in them were discredited and one of the most telling weaknesses and failures of George W. Bush ceased to be a campaign issue.

Its the only explanation that covers the big holes in the Republicans' version. First, that Killian's secretary acknowledged that the documents weren't the ones she typed, but the contents of the documents were what she remembered typing. And, second, how Republican party operatives who lacked the ability to identify MS TrueType Times Roman if they had the papers in front of them with a microscope and measuring tools, somehow managed the extraordinary feat while merely viewing some low-resolution images of the documents on a TV screen. And, third, how bloggers on a number of right-wing websites were almost simultaneously making the same identification under the same impossible conditions.

No, the only conclusion that covers ALL of the facts is that Rather got punked and Bush got rid of a controversy that was a potential campaign breaker. Not the first or last time something like that happened in a Karl Rove managed campaign.

Murphy, I, for one, would love to see the phrase "Under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.

It was NOT in the original Pledge that was written in 1892 by a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, and used for 60 years without mention of any god.

In fact, although religious people are now outraged about lobbying groups trying to restore the Pledge, it was religious lobbying groups, led by the Catholic organization, the Knights of Columbus, and a Presbyterian Minister named Rev. Dr. George MacPherson Docherty, an immigrant from Scotland, who finally convinced President Eisenhower to add the phrase "under God" to the Pledge in 1954, 62 years later.

This changed the entire meaning of the Pledge from a pledge of one's primary allegiance to one's country, the United States of America, to a pledge of primary allegiance to a christian god and,secondarily, only subsumed "Under God," the nation.

If you can't find any reason to be outraged that overtly religious pressure groups lobbied for years to have the phrase added to a perfectly good 62 year old Pledge of Allegiance, why do you get outraged that others are putting on precisely the same sort of pressure to return it to its original form and intent?

The religious wackaloons are bloody hypocrites, if you ask me...