| September 2004 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | ||
In his defense tonight of the documents which are the subject of Rathergate, Dan Rather ignored one of the biggest indications of the forgery of those documents: the use of proportional fonts.
For those who’ve been reading about proportional fonts and would like an example of how they differ from non-proportional, or monospaced, fonts, here’s an illustration, using text from one of the memos, as seen in an image at PowerLine:
Proportional Font
Non-Proportional (or Monospaced) Font
In a proportional font, each character takes up only the width it needs; for example, a letter “i” takes up less space than a letter “w”.
In a monospaced font, all characters take up the same width.
For illustrations of many more discrepancies between the memos and technology that was available in 1973, see Peter Duncan and ImageShack.
Michael Moore recently posted an elaborate justification for his decision to withdraw F911 from competition for the Best Documentary Oscar:
20 million people have already seen it. ...But can it also be shown on TV? I brought this possibility up in this week’s Rolling Stone interview. Our contract with our DVD distributor says no, it cannot. I have asked them to show it just once, perhaps the night before the election. So far, no deal. But I haven’t given up trying.
The only problem with my desire to get this movie in front of as many Americans as possible is that, should it air on TV, I will NOT be eligible to submit “Fahrenheit 9/11” for Academy Award consideration for Best Documentary. Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release (fiction films do not have the same restriction).
Although I have no assurance from our home video distributor that they would allow a one-time television broadcast—and the chances are they probably won’t—I have decided it is more important to take that risk and hope against hope that I can persuade someone to put it on TV, even if it’s the night before the election.
Therefore, I have decided not to submit “Fahrenheit 9/11” for consideration for the Best Documentary Oscar.
That is hilarious. Do you follow that? He knows it won’t be shown on TV, but if he could get it shown on TV, it would be disqualified for the Best Documentary Oscar; therefore he’s not submitting it for that Oscar.
Yeah, right.
Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents.
And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls. —Senator John McCain
I suggest that the real reason he’s not submitting it for that Oscar is because he knows it isn’t a documentary. He knows it’s so full of false statements that it can’t be considered one. He knows that with all the money it’s made, it would come in for harsh examination if he were to submit it for that category and all his false statements would be widely exposed. It would be disqualified for the Best Documentary Oscar for being non-factual.
Update 9-15-04. Welcome, Carnival of the Vanities readers! This site is proud to have this article included in the latest Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by the creator and manager of the Carnival, Silflay Hraka.
Click here to see THE BIG PICTURE’S latest posts.
