The comments section is gold. Plenty of irresponsible speculation.

And, naturally, it ties right into Uncle Karl's TANG ploy.

UPDATE I added, there in comments, this:

FWIW, what I came to believe on TANG:

1. Let's remember that the TANG story made it all the way from an obscure blogger (one "Buckhead," who turned out to be a Federalist Society member and voting machine expert (!!) from Atlanta) to FOX news in a single news cycle. That stinks of yet another orchestrated disinformation campaign, to me.

2. I never bought into the "word processing" theory at the time because, back in the early 70s, I myself owned an IBM typewriter that justified type and had serifed fonts. And all the "experts" who testified against the authenticity of the memo had never physically examined it, which is a violation of professional ethics for graphologists. (Not to excuse CBS for only verifying the signature, even though the memo itself was a multi-generation xerox.) Finally, IRRC, the memos had a ragged baseline with letters out of alignment, much more characteristic of produced by mechanical means rather than by a digital system like a word processor (see below). Sure, anything can be PhotoShopped, but the wingers didn't frame the argument that way, and in any case only physical examination of the documents could resolve that. (That we were arguing about fake documents using online reproductions that could, themselves, be faked, merely added to the surreality of the episode.)

3. Nobody disputed the underlying facts in the Killian memos that Rather went with. In fact, the secretary on the base at the time, when interviewed, didn't remember the memo, but vouched for the accuracy of the memo's content. And there is plenty of other evidence that Bush didn't complete his service, must obviously that nobody ever came forward to claim the $10,000 reward that Gary Trudeau offered for a witness who saw him do it.

4. The real tragedy is that Rather went with Killian, an impeachable witness, instead of connecting to Paul Lukasiak of the blogosphere, who did serious work with the TANG payroll records (below), which showed, using evidence that was in now way controvertible, that Bush was paid for TANG work that he didn't perform.

What this post adds is:

5. The reason that internal corporate politics at CBS would work to take Rather down.

As regards the authenticity of the memos themselves. I'm left with two possibilities:

A. The memos were authentic in both content and medium (see above comment on serifs), but that corporate politics and the compressed time frame imposed by the winger assault prevented that from happening. (They "hung tough" for two weeks, but IIRC made no further examinations of the memos. That sounds like corporate politics to me; the denial of resources.)

B. The memos were authentic in content, but not in medium. This would be a classic Rovian bankshot of deliberately planting TRUE information in a form that could be discredited.

Link to summing up, with mechanical means analysis

http://corrente.blogspot.com/2004/10/bus...

Link to Lukasiak's payroll records work:

http://corrente.blogspot.com/2004/07/bus...

Various links on the story as it unfolded:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=...

Would be nice if someone like, say TPM ripped open that seam. They could start with the payroll records.