Well, it’s Wednesday and I see we’re still here...

Does that mean it didn’t work?

Bill Quick channels Arthur C. Clarke:

The problem with technology that becomes sufficiently advanced as to appear magical is that it will be opposed by people who believe in magic.

Elsewhere:  Typo!
Later (added 080911 17:47):  and Another!

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“...just bring some beer, a collar, and a wedding ring.”

Ready now?

This is what happens when you let flyover women out of the kitchen and allow them firearms. They immediately turn freaky and sexy on you, slap on corsets, pick up riding crops, start lesbian orgies and call flyover men up in the middle of the night demanding they come over and join in. This is why, in fact, gun control is so disfavored in flyover country, and it is why so many men stay in flyover country. Hordes of crop-wielding lesbian freaky women stalk the streets after midnight, looking for man flesh...

After that, you KNOW you want to read the whole thing.

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Four years ago today

On the evening of Wednesday, September 8, 2004, the CBS News program “60 Minutes II” ran a story “New Questions on Bush Guard Duty.”  The story was built around several documents that purported to show preferential treatment for George W. Bush by the Texas National Guard during his Vietnam-era service, and timed to appear simultaneously with a similar story in the Boston Globe.  If true, the report would have been tremendously damaging to Bush, and could easily have affected the outcome of the election, less than one month away.

Even before the program had finished, sceptical viewers were posting suspicions that the documents weren’t all they seemed; that, in fact, they were forgeries.

To: Howlin

WE NEED TO SEE THOSE MEMOS AGAIN!

They are not in the style that we used when I came in to the USAF. They looked like the style and format we started using about 12 years ago (1992). Our signature blocks were left justified, now they are rigth of center...like the ones they just showed.

Can we get a copy of those memos?

107 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 8:19:00 PM
by TankerKC (R.I.P. Spc Trevor A. Win'E American Hero)

and within hours...

To: Howlin

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction 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 systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

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

This should be pursued aggressively.

47 posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:59:43 PM
by Buckhead

(The post numbers in the footers are direct links to these Free Republic posts.)

By the next morning, the controversy was all over the web, and for the next week or so, bloggers and their commenters did the research that the MSM should have done.  What had begun as a classic case of “gotcha” journalism quickly turned in to an exploration of reporting standards and media ethics.  By the time the dust had settled, the story had been demolished, the documents found to be phony, CBS News and its anchor Dan Rather were in disgrace, the mainstream press embarrassed, and the pajama-wearing bloggers triumphant. And one month later, Bush won the election.


The neat thing is, most of those web posts and comments are still around! Today you can start at the beginning and follow the whole controversy, as it unfolded.

Bill at INDCJournal got things rolling with:

Power Line’s coverage starts here:

And: Little Green Footballs:  CBS Killian Document Index

Enjoy!

Previously:

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The Religion of Malignantly Narcissistic Entitlement

Latest London lunacy from Stephen Pollard:

Later this month it’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It's one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, so I’d be obliged, please, if you'd all stay at home, turn off the TV and refrain from your usual activities. Ten days after that it’s Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews fast and spend the day in synagogue. So I've also asked my Times colleagues not to work then. And I will be mightily offended if I learn afterwards that any of them have been eating.

You might not think I am being serious. But if I was Head of Democratic Services at Tower Hamlets Council in East London, I would be. Last week John Williams e-mailed each of the borough's 51 councillors with a similar instruction.

For the duration of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, they are, he told them - every one of them, Muslim, Catholic, Jew or atheist - to behave during council meetings as strict Muslims. They are not to eat or drink; they are to break for Muslim prayers; they are to do as they are ordered by the Muslim religion...

But here’s the kicker:

It should come as no surprise that it is not the borough's Muslim councillors who are demanding that their non-Muslim colleagues obey Islam. As almost always, it is a caricature liberal-left non-Muslim idiot who thinks he is being racially aware who does the real harm to race relations.

Why do I think that the “Head of Democratic Services” wouldn’t be anywhere near as quick to accommodate Pollard’s request.

Via: Dr. Sanity, whose post is worth a read (and from whom I filched the title).
(Corrected version posted at 00:53, shortly after I discovered that the final paragraph of the quote– which makes a significant difference– had vanished during the editing process. And howz’at for a MSM-style explanation?)

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Clipfile - September 8, 2008

“If you want to live in a statist “utopia” where individual liberty is restricted in obeisance to the supposed “common good,” there are buses, trains, planes, and boats departing for such places every single hour of every single day. Take on off. Depart from us in peace, and may your chains rest lightly upon you. Leave those of us who still believe in freedom and Constitutional government with one place in all the world where we can live our own lives and make our own choices without you picking our pockets, tying our hands, and shackling our dreams.” – Mike Hendrix


(Via: Daily Pundit)

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Who’s “reactionary?”

Melanie Philips has some advice for David Cameron... and John McCain:

In Britain and America - as in other parts of the Western world, too - an enormous gulf now yawns between leaders and led.

People have concluded that politicians of all parties seem to inhabit a world apart, governed by self-interest, cynicism, corruption, incompetence, deep contempt for the electorate and an incorrigible instinct to deceive them.

Politicians know this. Which is why they all purport to stand on a platform of “change.”
...
...Here's where British Tories should be paying close attention - McCain is not popular with truly conservative Republicans.
...
As a result, the danger was that they would not turn out for him on election day. And exactly the same danger is lurking for David Cameron. If conservatively-minded voters want to turf Labour out but have no enthusiasm for the Tories, the risk is they will simply stay at home...

Like McCain and Obama, Cameron too has grasped the public's anti-establishment mood.

But he made the error of assuming that the reactionary old order to be overturned was conservatism, while change, hope and progress resided on the Left.

But this is a caricature which, although an article of faith among the media, bears scant relation to reality...

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“Clueless” home buyers

The weekend takeover of Fannie and Freddie by the feds has restarted a lot of talk about the mess in the housing market. On the conservative side, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the “foolish/clueless” buyers who “bought more house than they could afford” and “failed to be cautious” of things like adjustable rate mortgages. They should have “done their research,” and not “ignored the warnings in the disclosures.” (paraphrasing comments by one local radio talker)

I’ll buy that, to a degree. But as somebody who has spent the last three months as an on-the-sidelines witness to a couple of real estate closings, I want to say that it’s not that simple, at least for most home buyers.

more...

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3:00 a.m. phone call

Via:  londonamerican

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Breaking news: Women Want Time For Families and Isn’t Sarah Palin Awful

Wow, I spent so much time on that last post that there’s not enough left to deal with another item on today’s WSJ opinion page, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman’s “Let’s Talk About Palin’s Family Challenges.”

Actually, that’s probably a good thing.  Otherwise I’d be wasting time over what is, when all is said and done, yet another example of progressive goal-post-moving.  For it seems that, after all those years of feminist agitation, women not only don’t want to “have it all,” but look unfavorably at those who do:

What Sarah Palin did not do, however, is put an end to the latest national conversation about “trying to have it all.”  Because the question we're all asking isn’t can she do it, but why is she doing it?  Mrs. Palin, you see, happens to be bucking a new national trend.  Even as most mothers across America chuckle appreciatively about pit bulls and lipstick and applaud her bravado, they are making choices that look very un-Palinesque.
...
Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours.  We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children.  Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life.  More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success...

Note the subtile criticism: Sarah Palin has bought “the onwards-and-upwards drive to... the West Wing,” which her more sophisticated sisters (who, in days of yore, dumped their kids into daycare at the earliest opportunity) have decided they no longer want.  How, um, old-fashioned.  Didn’t she get the memo?

It’s because she’s actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities

And, heaven knows, one must never do that!  Somebody might get a case of the vapours.

of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she’s not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently...

You get the drift.  But before leaving this, I might point out that women with families have always had to balance work and home, and that, outside of the New York-Washington-Los Angeles hothouse, many of them have chosen “nontraditional” forms of employment to better accommodate family needs.  Some of them even get assistance from their husbands.  None of this is new. Except perhaps to (unmarried?) media people.^[1]

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A no-longer hidden war

Peggy Noonan, pining for the good old days (the ones when people didn’t leave open microphones lying around):

We have had these old press fights in the past – they were a source of constant tension when I was a child, when Barry Goldwater came forward as a conservative and the press scorned him as a flake, and later when Ronald Reagan came up and the press dismissed him as Bonzo.

And Jerry Ford. You know, the guy who couldn’t hit a golf ball without braining somebody, and who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Oh, and of course Dan Quayle. And Bush I. And Bush II.

But this latest fignt commences on a new and wilder battlefield. The old combatants were old school gentlemen, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite;

Ah yes, those specialists in the Always Deniable Attack Indirect, notably the Raised Eyebrow and the Questioning Inflection. But Different Times require Different Measures!

the new combatants are half-crazy cable anchors, the lower lurkers of the Internet, and the anonymous posters on the comment thread on the radical web site.

Who originate the smears. Which the “legitimate”press then “reports”.without checking. Oh, and don’t forget to mention the New York Times. (Fortunate that we dealt with Dan Rather four years ago.)

This new war on new turf is not good, and carries the potential for great harm...

A friend IM-ed the day after Palin’s speech, and I told him of an inexplicable sense of foreboding.

Cue scary music.

This campaign, this beautiful golden thing with two admirable men at the top and two admirable vice presidential candidates, is going to turn dark.

Didn’t take.long, did it?

Hey Peggy, it’s the same old war, it’s just that this time around, the legacy media is no longer making even an effort to conceal that they’re the propaganda arm of the Democratic party.


Elsewhere:

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