This is why we call it the Los Angeles Slimes: GOP Activist Made Allegations on CBS Memos.

While bloggers and some conservative activists have hailed Buckhead as a hero in their longtime effort to paint the mainstream media as politically biased, some Democrats and even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead’s detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested White House involvement.

You don’t have to make much of an effort to paint the LA Slimes as biased when they publish ridiculous hit pieces like this. Shocka! Someone posting at FreeRepublic is … gasp! … a Republican! Alert the authorities!

And the Slimes infers that Buckhead’s original comment was such a detailed, scarily technical explanation that he must have been coached by the evil Karl Rove, who is now apparently a typography expert as well as a Machiavellian puppet master.

Here (from Power Line) is the post Buckhead made at FreeRepublic:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush’s failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatine or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s.

Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.

The LA Times describes this as “a highly technical” explanation, but that’s sheer nonsense. Buckhead’s post shows a good layman’s grasp of basic typography concepts, and a working knowledge of the kind of technology that has been used in offices for decades. There’s nothing highly technical about it, and only a clueless journalism graduate who has never used a typewriter, employed by a notoriously biased liberal newspaper, would try to paint it as such.

I’d recommend that the LA Times staff take a look at a real highly technical explanation, but it might make their heads explode.