Magic Tricks

We all know that magicians trick us by distracting us -- shift our attention in one direction while they work their magic in the other. Is that the case with the charges of forgery that followed last Wednesday's CBS report on Bush military records?

Some facts seem undisputed: Bush went to Alabama, he failed to take his physical which rendered him suspended from flying. Bush's insistence that he reported for duty in Alabama during the 1972-73 period has not been corroborated by documents or testimony from officers in Alabama. The CBS documents were damning only because they are the first documents to surface from the period. And yet.

Cries of forgery were to be expected and were forthcoming in the blogosphere immediately. One nationally recognized forgery expert first said "forgery" then backpedaled. Jules Siegel has related his experiences with IBM proportional type from the 50s and has painstakingly sought to figure out - for his own peace of mind - is this or is this not a forgery? You can follow his train of thought and see scans of his experiments on his blog:

"Do not fall in love with any given hypothesis. This is a swamp. Nothing is real. At the moment, CBS holds all the cards. If they have decided to crush Bush, it's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's not like they don't have the resources to create anything at all that they want or need to do it."

And while non-typographers and people who hadn't even been born when the typewriter in question woud have been used wrangle over computer-generated versions of photocopied and/or faxed documents ... the big issues of war, economy, civil liberty, health care, social security, bankrupt airlines et al languish behind the magician's cloak. What is the name of the magician with the cloak? I doubt we ever know, but he (she?) is probably laughing his head off. After all, the audience -- voters, media, pundits -- has dutifully followed the distraction.