All the fuss about the CBS story on Bush's service memos and the blogosphere's capacity to find conspiracy anywhere...and then to give itself the blue ribbon first prize in the journalism category at the fair...is a matter of one fact. Did IBM make a version of a font ball, like those illustrated above on sale on eBay, for its Selectric model of typewriter which could provide all the features displayed in the memo? If it did, it should be easily provable. If IBM offered custom font balls, it should be easily provable. Yet no one has just pulled out an IBM Selectric font ball catalog with a characters page. If IBM did not sell such a font ball, the documents is forged and CBS should just say so. Then we are either dealing with a high school prank, a rogue CBS staffer or...an attack on democracy!!! I am leaning towards high school prank.

The question, however, of who and why this forgery was done is secondary to the pre-condition to whether it is a forgery at all. The lack of anyone addressing the merely factual pre-condition is, for me, the real conspiracy...and, jalakazam, I am a journalist!