Typeology
Who knew that the fate of the free world in 2004 would hinge on an IBM Selectric II typewriter? There are more important things to talk about, but here are some valuable rebuttals culled from the Daily Kos diaries. They're not written by media reporters or even the owners of blog spaces, but by regular folks (diarists) who have joined the Daily Kos site and have some views to express (either opinion or factual).

First up is the area of rhetoric that needs to be focused on:

The real story of the "memo debate"
The following exchange between Dan Rather and Dan Bartlett raises interesting questions that should be the focus of discussion.

Q: Is your suggestion that these documents, at least a couple of them, could have been fabricated?

DAN BARTLETT: I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that the fact that documents like this are being raised when, in fact, all they do is reaffirm what we've said all along, is questionable.

The President's spokesman did not dispute the validity or content of the memos.  In fact, he said they "reaffirm what we've said all along."

The White House has not issued a statement about any of the memos, one of which was addressed to George W. Bush, ordering him to get a physical.  Even faced with the question of whether Bush disobeyed a direct order, Bartlett, nor the White House since, has denied the veracity of that memo.  Nor did they claim Bush never received that memo.  They took it totally in stride as if, "Of course that memo was written.  It is consistent with our version of events.  We have no reason to dispute it."   The only thing he ever questions is the timing of their release.

[...]

Far from disavowing the memo, Bartlett embraces it and confirms that Bush did exactly what it said.

Q: But these are two official memorandums. Any idea of why these would not be in the record?

DAN BARTLETT: I can't explain why that wouldn't be in his record, but they were found in Jerry Killian's personal records themselves, is what I've been told. But it reaffirms exactly what President Bush said. Everybody knows President Bush didn't take his flight exam. After flying for 400 -- more than 500 hours in the cockpit, President Bush, after his fourth year in service, asked for permission to go in a non-flying capacity to Alabama. There was not reason for President Bush to take a flight exam if he wasn't going to be flying.

[...]

If the memos are ultimately discredited and Bush calls "foul!", the media will need to be reminded that they were never denied, in fact, they were confirmed and eagerly embraced as true, but meaningless.

But if we need to really get into the nitty gritty of the history of typography, this is must reading:

I'm an Expert, and I Say They're Not Forged

I studied typography as an academic discipline (circa 1971) as part of the old journalism school curriculum at U of Missouri.  I spent roughly 30 years in the book publishing business, most of which was on the production side dealing with type compositors and printers. I have worked with typography and printing processes from the end of the raised-metal-type era to current digital technology. I have designed and written complete type specifications for more books than I can remember.

[...]

Selectrics produced documents in a variety of type fonts, including Greek letters and all manner of esoteric scientific/mathematical symbols. You really could type open and close quotation parks and curly apostrophes. Superscript type was easily created by shifting. Even a reduced superscript "th" was technically possible, in spite of what the wingnuts are saying now.

It's true that some whizbangs took a couple of extra steps. People ask, Why would Killian have gone to the trouble of creating a reduced superscript "th"? But we're talking about the early 1970s here. Let's be frank -- in those dear departed times, real men did not touch typewriters. Trust me on this. It's highly probable Killian scribbled a note and gave it to one of the office "girls" to type up for his signature. The office "girls" hardly ever bothered about putting their initials on such documents, in spite of what the secretarial practice books said. But the "girl" would have typed the document very nicely.

Finally, I understand the wingnuts find it astonishing that the type seen in the Killian documents can be reproduced exactly in word processing documents today. But to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of typography, this is not astonishing at all. Times Roman characters produced on a lintotype machine in 1960 will match Times Roman characters created in Microsoft Word today. If two Times Roman characters were not exactly the same, one of them would not be classic Times Roman type, but something else.

[...]

But there is no evidence I've seen so far that has persuaded me the documents are forgeries. And I'm the best expert I know.

Now, perhaps, we can get the final word on this, via the Boston Globe (well, at least we can hope):

Philip D. Bouffard, a forensic document examiner in Ohio who has analyzed typewritten samples for 30 years, had expressed suspicions about the documents in an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, one in a wave of similar media reports. But Bouffard told the Globe yesterday that after further study, he now believes the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter available at the time.

Analysts who have examined the documents focus on several facets of their typography, among them the use of a curved apostrophe, a raised, or superscript, ''th," and the proportional spacing between the characters -- spacing which varies with the width of the letters. In older typewriters, each letter was alloted the same space.

Those who doubt the documents say those typographical elements would not have been commonly available at the time of Bush's service. But such characters were common features on electric typewriters of that era, the Globe determined through interviews with specialists and examination of documents from the period. In fact, one such raised ''th," used to describe a Guard unit, the 187th, appears in a document in Bush's official record that the White House made public earlier this year.