I know it is all deadly serious whether the CBS memos about Bush are fake or not but I think it is hilarious when any major news item attracts this kind of reporting:
Some former engineers who worked in the typewriter division said they were not aware of a standard typewriter that could have produced the Killian documents because the superscript letters in question were so rare. Robert A. Rahenkamp, a former I.B.M. manager who wrote a scholarly history on its typewriters for a company journal in 1981, said, “I’m not aware that we had any superscript technologies back in those days” on standard proportional space typewriters. Bill Glennon, a technology consultant in New York who worked for I.B.M. in Midtown Manhattan for 14 years and repaired typewriters throughout that time, said that the Executive had proportional spacing and that its typebar could be fitted with superscript characters. Documents from the period show the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969. But spokesmen for the National Guard and Texas Air National Guard said it was impossible to trace the machines that Colonel Killian’s unit, the 111th Fighter Intercept Squadron, or any unit, used so long ago. Mark Allen, chief of the external media division of the National Guard Bureau public affairs office, said there was no way to reconstruct the equipment or whether Colonel Killian typed the memos or had a clerk type them.
“…the Air Force tested the Selectric Composer as early as April 1969” – Classic. I am so glad that the US general election, the vote for who gets the nuclear bomb codes, is going to turn on the fact of whether the IBM Selectric Compostor model was in the Texas Air National Guard’s secretarial pool or not. War, deficit, character of the candidates – nah, who needs to consider that stuff.