The fraud that would not die

This reminds me of a film on The Simpsons called "The Creature that Ate Everything" which consisted of one character saying "What about So and So?" and the other answering "It ate everything!"

You'd think that it would be enough that CBS used documents without seeing the originals and that they could easily have been forged, but noooo! This guy, Associate Professor David Hailey, who donated $250 to Kerry, apparently thinks his position in the English Department at Utah State University, is an adequate platform from which to rescue CBS' fading reputation, and finds out that people aren't willing to take his word for it the way his students do.

He posts a long analysis on the internet, purporting to demonstrate that one of the memos could have been typed on a mechanical typewriter, except that he does it using Photoshop. Oops. Now he's feeling sorry for himself because he's been deluged with email denouncing him. And, apparently, his website has crashed or been taken down by the university.

I'm a lawyer from a small rural town, but when an English professor, even one with a degree in technical communications, decides to set himself up as a document analyst, even I know he's in for trouble. I don't know if he's ever appeared as an expert witness, but his opinion lacks foundation. He's not working with an original document, but a digital image of one that has been copied and recopied multiple times. He posts his own comparison which he implies is typewritten, but isn't. Hailey says he knows typewriters, but somewhere in the train of his argument, he switched to a computer typeface called "typewriter."

Bush-Hate fatigue? I'd say more like embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Kerry demonstrates how he "won" the debate, on style points.