Dan Rather Is Just Plain Nuts

Can Dan Rather be this insane?

CBS aired the story on Sept. 8, 2004, at the height of the presidential campaign, hours after White House official Dan Bartlett did not challenge the authenticity of the memos when asked about them by CBS. Bartlett said later that he had no way of knowing on such short notice whether the memos were real.

Gold, Rather’s lawyer, maintained that “nobody’s proved the documents were forgeries. The way we look at it, it’s more than likely the documents are authentic.”

His former workmates think so, and ridicule the fact that Rather is now trying to say he just read the words given him:

Several former colleagues said they were baffled by the move. "I think he’s gone off the deep end," said Josh Howard, who was forced to resign as executive producer of "60 Minutes II" after CBS retracted the story. "He seems to be saying he was just the narrator.

"He did every interview. He worked the sources over the phone. He was there in the room with the so-called document experts. He argued over every line in the script. It’s laughable."

Rome Hartman, a former executive producer of "CBS Evening News" who now works for the BBC, said: "It’s got to be about this lasting sense of hurt and pride. I was flabbergasted. I just don’t get it."

~~~

Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS correspondent and a sharp critic of Rather, said yesterday that the former anchor is a great reporter, "but the dark side is that he’s unwilling or incapable of accepting responsibility. . . . This is the man who signed off his newscast with ‘courage,’ and now he’s alleging ‘they made me do it, they just put the words in front of me.’ This is ridiculous on so many levels."

In the suit, Rather says he "played largely a supervisory role" in producing and vetting the story because he had been instructed to concentrate on his anchoring duties and covering a Florida hurricane and the Republican National Convention in New York.

Said Howard, the former executive producer, who is now a CNBC executive: "You can’t have it both ways. He wasn’t forced to read the script. He pressured us to put the story on the air."

And this is from people sympathetic to the man (except for Goldberg of course).  I’m actually kinda floored at this lawsuit seeing as how there is no way possible that these documents are real.  Just isn’t going to happen.  People across the globe have examined this thing in minute detail and come away that this document is a fraud. 

I mean come on.  The memo was done in a format the the USAF did not start using until 1992 or 1993.  The typing so obviously came from a computer using typeset-style word processing software.  Those who were hired by SeeBS to authenticate the memo have stated they were not given the opportunity to completely examine the memo.  And the source of the fake memo has admitted he forged it.

But this lawsuit may be the best show around and may even detail the connections between SeeBS and the Kerry campaign as Jeff Gannon alleges:

In my book, “The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report”, I detailed my involvement as a White House correspondent in the unraveling of the failed political takedown of President Bush on the eve of his re-election campaign. In the chapter, “Shock and Awe, Shocking and Awful”, I reported that my source inside CBS News pointed me toward Mary Mapes as the key player in what later became one of the biggest media scandals in American history. I broke the story about Mapes on Sean Hannity’s radio show, identifying her as the procurer of the phony documents.

I also wrote about the near-meltdown of CBS’ News Washington Bureau and the split between factions loyal to Rather and insurgents that saw the scandal as an opportunity to topple the tyrannical and narcissistic anchor. The announcement of the “independent” investigation of the story conducted by the network’s own lawyers served as a firebreak to tamp down the fiasco, not an effort get to the bottom of it.

If anything, the Thornburg-Boccardi report whitewashed the events surrounding the “flawed” story. Employees of CBS coordinated with members of the Kerry campaign to damage Bush, but the report dismissed the many incestuous connections between the two groups. It also downplayed the perspective from which individuals at CBS News reported the story.

Think about it, he may very well shine a spotlight on the true relationship between the MSM and the Democrat party.

I know, crazy talk, but it’s nice to daydream every once in awhile.

UPDATE

From The Corner:

Won’t this put CBS in the position of proving that the documents in question are in fact bogus? If that is true, the irony is a beautiful thing to behold.

Beautiful!

Other’s Blogging:

• Baltimore Reporter
• Blogs For Bush
• Rhymes With Right
• Dummies Funnies
• Newsbusters
• Right Wing News
• Captain’s Quarters
• A Blog For All
• Wizbang
• LGF
• Ace of Spades HQ

Curt

See author page