When You Reach the Edge of the Cliff... Turn

Having fallen out of the loop for a few day's, it's taken me a little while to reorient myself to the news of the day. As the election season heats up, it's easy to become acclimated to the pitch; step away for a time, however, and the line between the sides could not more clearly be a line between two entirely distinct realities.

Having picked one component of the investigation of Dan Rather's memos — the superscript — and decided, from personal experience, that the most superficial version of the evidence isn't true, Shiela Lennon grows in her respect for Mr. Rather:

A journalist's loyalty is to the ongoing truth of the story as it develops, whatever that may turn out to be.

I've seen very little of that in the blogosphere this week. I've seen a lot of whoops based on ignorant assumptions that were just plain wrong. ("Typewriters couldn't do that then" about things I did with typewriters then.)

Certainty based on nothing doesn't affect the truth of what happened one bit and is worthless.

Although I can't put my hands on it, at this moment, in the first day's rush of analysis, I did come across a blog post noting that some typewriters could superscript, but that the results looked nothing like the "th" in the CBS memos. (The particular post that I saw had images of the two, but I'm sure the observation has been made multiple times.) The point is that Ms. Lennon's superscripting experience as an intern at Brown University is incomplete in its application to the controversy: what did those superscripts look like? Surely, loyalty to the ongoing truth requires that comparison to be made.

To be honest, my editor's eye has led me to believe that Ms. Lennon meant her phrase to be written thus: "the ongoing anti-Bush truth of the story." Here's her very next paragraph:

This developing story brought a witness forward, Marian Carr Knox, secretary to Lt. Col. Killian in the '70s, a witness who knows what happened then, who says the memos reflect the reality she saw, but she does not know how that particular set of memos came to be. The tale of the memos themselves -- where they came from, who typed them, who held them, who turned them loose -- is now a sidebar to that story.

Knox, in short, renders Lennon's typing memory irrelevant, and her detraction fatuous. However, with a neat turn of paraphrasing, Lennon omits Ms. Knox's certainty that the documents were fake so as to pivot toward a Michael Moore-like assertion that the underlying truth can be captured with false evidence, and that the falsity of that evidence is immaterial. Also immaterial, apparently, is Ms. Knox's status as a Democrat parrot of such lines as "selected, not elected." (As well as all conflicting testimony from others who knew George Bush during his Guard days.)

My essential point is this: all sides of a political battle will be inclined (to one extent or another) to accept witnesses serving their own opinions without thorough scrutiny, but I think the American Left, particularly its representatives in the mainstream media (if that's not redundant), are reaching near delusion in their practice of what ought to be a natural tendency that one strives to neutralize. The dubious motivation of those who help John Kerry must be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (and even then...); the taint on those whose testimony helps Bush can be assumed by the fact that their testimony helps Bush.

For whatever reason, I prefer to believe that people realize, whether explicitly or subconsciously, that they're donning offal as finery. But do they? To some folks, Dan Rather is a hero; what percentage of his time does he spend speaking exclusively with them?

ADDENDUM:
There was another blog post comparing the superscripts with other superscripts from contemporary National Guard memos, with the latter being not only differently shaped, but underlined as well. However, this post was the one that I was thinking of. The bottom line is that, to approximate the superscript for his quick, never-to-be-seen memo, Killian would have had to switch the actual font ball in the typewriter and might have been required to make multiple tries to get the thing as perfectly as in the memos.

But remember: the point here is Sheila Lennon's scoffing at the blogosphere's "whoops based on ignorant assumptions," as compared to the serious journalism practiced by the likes of Dan Rather. Yet, here we have a widely linked blog post actually researching the technology involved and comparing samples. Many bloggers may not have been Ivy League interns in the early '70s, but they're clearly not afraid to follow a story to discover whether or not their claims are accurate.

Whoop!