Bush's Guard Service and the Right Wing's 60 Minutes Mythology

by Salvador Peralta
published by The Progressive Trail

Bush's Guard Service and the Right Wing's 60 Minutes Mythology

On Wednesday of this week, CBS's 60 Minutes aired a segment which shed some light on President Bush's failure to fulfill his military obligations to the Texas Air National Guard. 60 Minutes Later, the Right Wing punditry started to respond...


The documentation that 60 Minutes used as the basis for their story included the following:

A memo ordering Bush to take a physical

A memo discussing "options of how Bush can get out of coming to drill from now through November." And that due to other commitments "he may not have time."

A document suspending Bush for "failure to perform to U.S. Air Force/Texas Air National Guard standards and for failure to take his annual physical as ordered."

A memo from Bush's squadron commander where "he is being pressured by higher-ups to give the young pilot a favorable yearly evaluation; to, in effect, sugarcoat his review. He refuses, saying, 'I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job.'"

Within hours of the airing of the 60 Minutes segment, a user named "Buckhead" posted to the FreeRepublic.com web site asserting that proportionally-spaced fonts were not common in 1972, and that the 60 Minutes story was a forgery.

This post was picked up on the blog LittleGreenFootballs.com, and went from there to the CyberSpace News Service where it spread via the drudgereport from whence it was sucked into the right wing press outlets such as Fox news and the Weekly Standard as gospel before finally making it's finally into the mainstream media including the AP, LA Times, and Washington Post.

Holding aside the journalistic credibility of the original sources for this story, "littegreenfootballs.com" and "Buckhead", a cursory glance at the facts of the matter show that the entire right wing line is built on a foundation of decepton. The general line of the right wing attack machine is as follows:

Don't deny the story outright. Just raise the possibility that the documents *might* be faked. This gives partisans something to latch onto and a talking point to start regurgitating in the right wing press. Repeat the lie often enough and some people will regard it as the truth.

Of course, that only works if people don't take the time to debunk the lies. So with that in mind, let's deconstruct the four major planks of the right wing's attack on the 60 Minutes Story:

1. Times New Roman Fonts did not exist in 1972

FALSE! The Times New Roman font was developed in 1931 by Stanley Morison, Typographical Advisor to the Monotype Corporation who adapted the font to the IBM selectric Typewriter in 1947.

2. Documents back then didn't have superscripted 'th' characters

FALSE! Superscripted fonts appear on other documents in Bush's flight school record, and had been available on IBM electric typewriters since 1947.

3. The document used proportional spacing which was not available in 1972

FALSE! Proportional spacing had been available on typewriters since 1941. Press advertisements dating back to 1952 and 1953 suggest that the feature was widely available, and was even used on Richard Nixon's resignation letter in 1974.

4. The document used curlycue apostrophes which did not exist on typewriters in 1972.

FALSE! Print advertisements for the IBM Exectuive typewriter show that curlycue apostrophes were used as early as 1953.

Proof that the air force was using typewriters capable of producing documents as early as 1966 can be found here.

The story is a cautionary tale about the effectiveness of the right wing smear machine at obfuscating facts and using outright lies to manipulate the public and to punish those who attempt to hold President Bush accountable for his actions.

[Joe's notes: Once again the Bush/Cheney campaign is using lies to sway the public into believing something that is not true. Hiding facts that they don't want the American People to know. The Corporate-Owned US News Outlets will let this story die as they have all other obvious lies coming from the Bush Administration. Don't expect them to inform the Citizens of the US if the Bush Administration doesn't want them to. They lied about the Swift Boat Ads (see earlier posts) and they barely reported it when the Swift Boat Liars were shown to be lying. WE THE PEOPLE will have to TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK from Special Interest Groups including the Corporate-Owned US News Outlets in order to have accuracy in reporting on our evening news and be a well informed public.]