The power of the blogosphere

I don't post often enough to keep up with breaking stories in the Blogosphere, but I had to discuss the 60 Minutes memo scandal. To summarize in the briefest terms, some early 70's memos concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard purport to make him look very bad, but the documents look fake. The memo features proportional type, not fixed width; there was a superscript th, not a common feature on a 1972 typewriter; the lines had 13 point spacing; and characters were kerned (when letters like t and o are moved closer together). Basically, the document appears to be composed with Microsoft Word today, not on a 1972 typewriter. (There is also the issue of some incorrect abbreviations and whether a referenced military document actually exists.)

Some have discussed that some of the features (the superscript and proportional type of a form) were on some typewriters of the time. However, they are difficult features to use, and it is doubtful that they would have been done for a memo to file. One point I haven't seen discussed, though, is: why hasn't a defender of the memo found a typewriter from the era with all these features, and typed the memo? Those who doubt the memo have demonstrated that Word can produce the memo, but if someone can find a typewriter that can produce the memo, that would deflate the argument.