San Diego Reader
TAKING A LONG WALK OFF A SHORT PIER, POINT LOMA — It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. When San Diego’s High Tech High International was named as one of six candidates nationwide to receive a commencement address from president Barack Obama this year, it was supposed to be a validation of how far the fledgling school had come in its first decade of existence. Chief administrative officer Ben Daley boasted that the selection proved the value of his school’s emphasis on “producing meaningful work for a real audience — making things that have lasting value and presenting them to professionals in the field.”
Now, he may be wishing that his students had kept their latest class project to themselves. In a good-natured effort to sweeten the pot for the president prior to his final decision, High Tech High seniors Ramesh Bhangoo and Christina Rivera decided to subject Obama’s recently-released “long-form” birth certificate to the sort of typographic scrutiny given to the so-called “Killian documents” that ultimately led to the resignation/retirement of CBS reporter Dan Rather.
“Remember how the right-wing wackos went nuts in 2004 over those documents that showed how Bush was basically AWOL from the Texas National Guard in the ’70s?” asks Bhangoo. “That guy at Little Green Footballs posted that gif file showing how a memo supposedly typed 30 years ago matched up to a Microsoft Word doc with proportionally spaced font. Of course, they didn’t actually prove that the documents were forgeries, but the fallout was enough to take down Rather, and the whole mess probably helped Bush win in ’04.”
