Is It Any Wonder That We Lost the Vietnam War?

I mean, considering the old-fashioned typewriters we had to work with and all…

As neither candidate seems capable of making a compelling case either for or against the current war, I am uninterested in what they were doing back when Brezhnev was still "alive." But in the interest of attending to this Hot Topic, the latest on President Bush's Air National Guard records:

CBS produces documents indicating Bush failed to obey an order. Rightwing bloggers smell a rat, produce counterevidence indicating the documents are forgeries:

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.

Story is recirculated enthusiastically. CNN reports White House produced copies of two of the docs, weakening the forgery accusation. However, White House copies turn out to be copies of the CBS originals, so forgery issue remains in play.

On the lighter side of the news: Terrorists blow up Australian embassy. Renewed fighting in Iraq. Defiant (and apparently alive) Zawahiri says U.S. losing in Afghanistan.

Update: Killian's son tells ABC one memo looks real, the other fishy.