Occam’s Razor is sharp, indeed
There is a scientific principle commonly known as “Occam’s Razor”, which basically says that, given two possibilities, the simplest explanation is usually true. This is one of the basic principles of scientific study, and has held true since since it was first stated by a 13th century philosopher.
Dan Rather and his friends at SeeBS are citing their unnamed document experts as proof that the Bush memos are real. Mind, you everyone they’ve named so far, when asked, seems to be insisting they never told 60 Minutes that the memos were authentic. (In one case, the network read excepts over the phone in order to elicit a “Well, it sounds kinda like something he might have written.”) Rather insists that he knows that the story is true, and dismisses the “rumor mills” of the Internet.
Well, the Internet has plenty of document experts on it, and one of them, Joseph Newcomer, has posted a highly detailed argument as to the illegitimacy of the supposed memos. I won’t repeat the specifics here (you can read the whole thing, if you like, but it beats the horse dead and keeps right on truckin’), but he makes a reference to Occam’s Razor about halfway along which neatly sums up the entire debate:
[W]e have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos
- Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the “authentic” document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
- The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.
Which one do you think is true? [....] How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?
The other side to me is this: If a machine existed in 1972 that could have produced these documents, there must be one in existence somewhere in the world. Why doesn’t somebody simply warm one up and reproduce the document? We’ve seen MS Word exactly reproduce the memos using it’s default settings, but nobody seems to be able to reproduce it using a machine that existed when the documents are dated. They can talk all they want about how such a thing theoretically existed — last time I checked, the news was supposed to be based on facts and real-world events, not partisan theories.
I should note at this point, lest you misunderstand my interest in this story, that I don’t give a rat’s ass about what GWB did back in the National Guard. That question has been brought up before, and the public yawned. What grabs my attention is how thorougly the most famous broadcaster in the country is willing to stake whatever credibility he still has on a story that will fail to take down the president he so hates. This is reminiscent of Al Gore’s meltdown. The left in this country is losing it, and the extreme Bush-hater mania is moving far beyond the fringe to influence some very famous players.
In the meantime, Dan Rather’s credibility is rapidly approaching zero.
