A Lie Told Often Enough Is In Danger Of Being Accepted As Truth

One of the nastiest aspects of the mainstream media’s attacks on George Bush’s was the charge that he had gone AWOL from the National Guard. These charges were made by CBS Correspondent Dan Rather, who eventually was removed from his job because of the fraud involved.  Documents which the accusers of the President claimed to be the original documents involved were produced to illustrate the fact. The fact that the ‘original’ documents were written in a type font that did not exist at the time of their creation was overlooked by much of the media. Now the political left is at it again. They are bringing back the story in the form of a movie called, “Truth.” The movie would more accurately be named “Lies.”

In January 2005, The Weekly Standard posted an article relating to “Rathergate,” as the scandal eventually became known.

The article reported:

Appendix 4 of the CBS report (Compiled by independent investigators Dick Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi) details the panel’s inquiry into the technical aspects of the memos. It relies heavily on the testimony of Peter Tytell, a forensic document examiner with impressive qualifications, including having once been called a “famous typewriter detective” by CBS’s own Andy Rooney.

Like Newcomer, Tytell came to some quick conclusions. He told the panel that even while watching the September 10 CBS Evening News broadcast at home, he’d known “within 5 seconds” that something was wrong with the documents CBS was showcasing as newly discovered memos from 1972. In fact, on September 10–the same day Newcomer sent his essay to members of the media–Tytell had contacted CBS to explain “in detail why he believed the Killian documents were likely fakes.”

Eventually, the panel hired Tytell to serve as its document expert. He examined the Xeroxes carefully and came to three conclusions: (1) Previously released Texas Air National Guard documents from the early 1970s had been created on an “Olympia manual typewriter.” (2) The four disputed Killian memos “were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter.” And (3) “The Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle.”

Why was Tytell so sure? The Killian memos had proportional spacing, a superscript “th”, and a serif typestyle. Tytell consulted the Haas Atlas–the typesetter’s bible–looking for a typewriter model that could have produced these features in 1972, and “did not find a single match with the Killian documents.”

Now some in the movie industry are trying to reclaim Dan Rather’s reputation at the expense of George Bush. I suspect that many of the people who see the movie will be too young to actually know the truth of the events depicted. It is a shame that the movie industry finds it necessary to lie to the American people and call it “Truth.”