Mary Mapes, the "60 Minutes II" producer who brought us the fake George W. Bush National Guard documents, tells her side of the story in an upcoming book which is excerpted in December's Vanity Fair magazine. If you want the truth, don't read Mapes' account, but check out this post over at Little Green Footballs.

Suffice it to say, that the only people that still believe those fakes are authentic are also waiting on the next circuit of the Hale-Bopp comet so they can visit the spaceship hiding behind it.

But there is one contention that Mapes makes in her piece that I'd like to disabuse her of quickly.

Buckhead's conclusions and accusations were immediately echoed on a bouquet of other far-right Web sites -- particularly Power Line and Little Green Footballs -- places that most of the mainstream media had never heard of but would learn about in the hours, days, and weeks ahead. Their claims, unsubstantiated as they were, went virtually unchallenged by mainstream journalists, who didnt know a damned thing about typeface, kerning, or proportional spacing, either, but tried hard to appear as if they did. Skepticism, a supposed hallmark of journalism, was largely forgotten.

I can't speak for the TV media, but every newspaper in the country has multiple experts on typeface, kerning and proportional spacing -- they're called page designers and major metropolitan dailies have dozens of them.

Unfortunately for Mapes, it doesn't take a keen eye to tell that her documents were forgeries -- anyone who's old enough to have used a typewriter would've been able to tell her that typewritten documents don't look like the ones she touted as evidence of Bush's dereliction of duty.

Your 15 minutes are up. Now go away.