If you haven't heard the news by now about CBS's forged document show on "60 Minutes II" the other night then you need to pop over to Power Line for a few minutes.

Beldar, a lawyer himself, comments, graciously:

Either in logic or in law, the burden is squarely on CBS News to respond to those arguments — and to do so immediately. So far, there's no credible suggestion that CBS News has been actively complicit in forgery...

Technically, that's true: they've not been shown complicit in the forgery itself.

But as an ordinary guy on the street, I beg to differ when it comes to the overall picture: When journalists as a whole are willing to sit on the SwiftVets story for nearly two weeks, look aggressively for every single hole in the story, do background investigations on various swiftboat veterans pets -- then you bet they're complicit when they take a package of documents like this and run with it, on national TV, immediately!, without taking even the slightest interest in checking veracity.

Good heavens, it's not like the raised "th" and proportional font wasn't a giveaway. They could also at least have put in a call to Killian's family, from whom the documents supposedly originated. This sure wasn't a forgery executed on the skill level of "The Hitler Diaries."

Hey, maybe I'd have fallen for it. Who knows? But I'm not being paid for this full time, and, well, hate to say it, but I would like to think I'd caught the "th". I try not to be so partisan I'd be blind to such, but whether I am or not, 60 Minutes clearly was. And they deserve whatever flack (probably nearly none) they'll get for it. (Who's going to publicize their boo-boo? The rest of the mainstream media?)

Like I said, they could wait several week on the SwiftVets, and checked every nook and cranny. Clearly, there's a double-standard operating here.

Shame, 60 Minutes, shame.

As I've said of the New York Times: It's not a news source, it's a party organ. I hope people start to figure that out and calibrate accordingly.

Sadly, most people will probably never hear about this.

UPDATE: Oh, the left is so sad. They know so, so little. Take a look in the comments here at their "debunking" of the "forged" documents -- the same trick Charles Johnson did.

Where it says "Laugh at conspiracy theorists", they point out that the "th" is shifted a tiny bit up/down. Uh, guys, NONE of that should match. Not the "th", not the rest of the document nothing. Having used a selectic myself for years, understand this: There is no way a typewriter -- without kerning or any kind of font-reducing capabilities -- should ever even remotely match a Word document, which does.

Ever.

(I'm aware Charles printed it and found the "th" matched then. Even if he hadn't, my point is that the people who think this goes to 'disprove' a match are completely clueless about how typewriters work, and how they differ fundamentally from what word processors do.)

Now look at the second case. (Also here.) The document clearly matches exactly, except for several things: (1) the "Memo to File" was written on the wrong line (and may be in the wrong font). Duh. Also looks like a space was omitted on the 3rd line. Also where it says "He's been working..." Other than that, you can see the letters and words are aligning scarily well. Look at the lower-right hand where it says: "someone". Dead on. There is no way any 1970's typewriter should EVER align anywhere near that close with MS word. Words shouldn't even fall on the same lines.

The second looks great too, except they seem to have printed it at a slightly different scale. There's also some "height" to the copy (if the paper is raised or distorted you'll get some bending of lines and displacing of areas). But you can shift each over with your eyes a proportional amount from "SUBJECT:" and they match up, again, exactly.

If I had any question as to whether Charles Johnson was faking it, these guys, as his enemies, just proved he wasn't. Amazingly well.

If this is the definitive proof that CBS was forging documents, it shouldn't look like something that requires 3D glasses to read.

Yes, actually, that's a telling point, and you just put your finger on it: A "3-D" effect looks that way is because you are looking at the EXACT SAME OBJECT from two slightly differing angles. The author shows "they're different" by citing by citing an effect generated when two images are created from the same object in slightly different views.

(In fact, if you put on 3-D glasses, I'd suspect your eyes, in the first case, would actually show you one, neat, perfectly matching document, except for the spaces the authors did wrong, where the text would apear to be floating above the other text, yet still matching up.)

Again, look at the amazing alignment in the first case. Excellent. Two words from the end and every stroke of every letter, even if a millimeter or two off, is still exact.

It's too bad they appear to have no idea what they're talking about. I'll bet many of them have never even used a selectric.

Grasping at straws, indeed.

And clueless, to boot.

UPDATE 2: Peter Duncan illustrates overlaying an actual Selectric version of the document, proportional spacing and all against the one from CBS. The results are not even close.

Also look at "Part V: Not all Times New Roman's [sic] are Created Equal" for an illustration of why different companies' versions of the same font don't (and shouldn't) line up, pixel-for-pixel, for those who are unaware of such nuances, but feel the need to opine authoritatively anyway. (Duh -- if they were an exact match, one company were suing the other for copyright infringement.)