Rather deceptive? Memo-gate revisited

These are strange days. If you want to know how strange, just buttonhole someone old enough to recall the heyday of the JFK assassination controversy, and remind him that Dan Rather and Arlen "single bullet" Specter are now damned as liberals.

As long-time readers will know, I closely followed the "Memo-gate" controversy, in which right-wing bloggers "triumphed" over a mainstream news organ. Blogging was then considered a very good thing. Only left-wing bloggers are ever denounced as irresponsible rumor-mongers.

Yet the blogosphere's attacks on the controversial memos always struck me as spurious.

Rightists claimed that the memos could be reproduced using Microsoft Word. But the similarities between the bloggers' reconstructions and the CBS "originals" turned out to exist only when the pages were seen from a distance. Close examination showed clear differences in character formation.

Contrary to the bloggers' assertions, the font used in the memos matched neither Times Roman nor Palatino. Instead, it matched a proportional-spaced version of a typewriter font, just like the ones often used in books produced in small runs before the late 1980s. (You can see many such "typewritten" books if you pore through a good research library. Typesetters did not work cheap. I used to know one; she drove a much better car than I did.)

The raised superscript became a point of controversy. But Word always places that superscript in a different location (relative to the rest of the line) than is seen in the CBS memos, where it is much higher. The difference was obvious to me even when the comparison flashed on the TV screen during "Hardball."

The right-wing bloggers lied about that point. They continued to lie even after Dr. David Hailey, of the University of Utah, pointed out the problems in a cautiously-worded paper. Freepers attacked him like a pack of Nazi thugs, demanding his dismissal.

Rightists on cable news programs (Pat Buchanan, for one) declared the memos to be proven fakes. No such proof has ever existed; the authenticity of the papers remains a point of controversy. They even claimed that CBS did the faking. Some rightists who (willfully or otherwise) misunderstood the nature of the Burkett controversy will even tell you that CBS confessed that the memos were fakes. They never made any such confession, nor should they have done so.

Odd, isn't it? This was always a story about journalistic integrity. Yet the rightists felt free to lie and lie and lie.

And they called for blood whenever an expert voice dared to make a comment contrary to their script. Rather not only lost his job, he even had his masculinity questioned by the brownshirt brigades.

If you want to read an excellent retrospective on this controversy -- one which puts a few new facts on the table -- this piece by the Columbia Journalism Review is a must-read.

I was most interested to learn about those who appeared on TV defending Bush against Burkett's claims. These people were presented as disinterested parties, yet they were anything but. In fact, they had strong links to the Bush campaign.

For example, Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts -- in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few -- as Bush's old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described "heavy" of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, "There isn't anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady." He was made head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Bush's victory, resigned in 2003, and went on to head New Bridge Strategies, a firm that helps corporations land contracts in Iraq.

Danny James, a Vietnam veteran and the son of "Chappie" James, America's first black four-star general, is also a political appointee whose fortunes rose with Bush's. He had his own reason to dislike Burkett. Burkett's 2002 lawsuit in a Texas district court against the Guard claimed that the staff of then adjutant-general James retaliated against him for refusing to falsify reports. It was dismissed, like other complaints against James and the Guard, not on the merits, but because under Texas law the courts considered such complaints internal military matters. Without further investigation, we are stuck at he said, she said.

I think the turning point for any political party -- the point at which it ceases to be a traditional American-style party and becomes an Orwell-style party -- occurs when Party leaders demand sovereignty over reality itself. That which is real is that which the Party declares to be real. "Memo-gate" offers one demonstration -- among many -- that the Republican Party has descended to an Orwellian depth.

I'll never forgive Dan Rather for lying about the Zapruder film, or for his deceptive attacks on the Warren Commission's critics. But the ignominious end of his career -- clawed to death by the same reactionary monster he helped to inflict on our nation -- almost makes me feel sorry for him.

(And as for Arlen? Fuck 'im!)