[STARWISE]

As only the inimitable Peggy can, the picture painted seems so plausible.. he bought the fame and the press releases .. and but for his last desperate, brazenly stupid and biased campaign screw-up, might have gone out to cheers, honors and high-priced speeches. But the always veiled, unmitigated hubris and arrogance foiled that, and now he'll forever be linked with fraud. You almost had most of the country fooled, Dan .. sayonara.

[Graymatter]

How would you like your whole career to be judged by one mistake?

Wasn't just a rhetorical question, was it? but a curse worthy of Hawthorne.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[woofie]

excellent...the arrogance of the left is shown quite well

[fatima]

"The Education of Dan Rather"- Peggy Noonan captures Rather's rise, arrogance and dastardly fall
Opinion ,Gee how long did it take.

[Hetty_Fauxvert]

Terrific column, well worth reading in its entirety.

Rather's downfall is a lesson to us all ... Don't go wanting things to be true so much that you think they are true.

[rcocean]

Peggy is a classy lady and her column on Rather and her column made me think - but it's just little too easy on DR.

DR was always a hard left partisan and a bit of joke. His kooky behavior and the partisanship increased over the years until it did him in.

I'll mourn his passing. He was so partisan and kooky he made it impossible for anyone in Middle America to think he was peddling good ol' American news instead of liberal snakeoil, made and bottled in NYC. Cronkite and Brinkley were much dangerous since they had credibililty and when they lied, we believed them.

[capitan_refugio]

The article is an outstanding read. I urge everybody to follow the link and read the entire story. Thanks for posting it.

[I. M. Trenchant]

Linking Rather to the 'Nixon Crucifixion' was timely and justified. If Nixon had had a GOP House and Senate, he'd have served a full two terms and Watergate would never have become part of the language. Ted Kennedy inspired arch-segreagationist Sam Ervin to seek revenge for the Nixon adminstration's having managed to bring about full de-segregation of Southern schools after Ervin's fellow Democra, LBJ, only succeeded in getting 20% of the job done -- and Ervin never ceased to fester over Nixon's success in that area. As the late Stephen Ambrose put it in the final sentence of his trilogy of Nixon biography, the U.S. lost more than it gained when Nixon was forced to resign. Among other things, the Vietnam War would have ended in a Korea-type stalemate between North and South.

[razorback-bert]

Ultimately this is what I think was true about Dan and his career. It's not very nice but I think it is true. He was a young, modestly educated Texas boy from nowhere, with no connections and a humble background. He had great gifts, though: physical strength, attractiveness, ambition, commitment and drive. He wanted to be a star. He was willing to learn and willing to pay his dues. He covered hurricanes and demonstrations, and when they got him to New York they let him know, as only an establishment can, what was the right way to think, the intelligent enlightened way, the Eastern way, the Ivy League way, the Murrow School of Social Justice way. They let him know his simple Texan American assumptions were not so much wrong as not fully thought through, not fully nuanced, not fully appreciative of the multilayered nature of international political realities. He swallowed it whole.

Having lived in NY and associated with such people, I know this to be true. If Dan hadn't changed, he would have been back in Houston reading the news with Marvin Zindler.

[q_an_a]

it is wonderful to read a great writer, they take you to places you may not like, but the ride gives you a reason to enjoy life. Peggy Noonan is in the driver seat again.

Thanks STARWISE for being first to post her article.

[Buckhead]

Fabulous article.

[larryjohnson]

link later

[Kay Syrah]

Peggy Noonan's prose as her thoughts is always clear, kind, elegant and lyrical. I'm not sure that Rather deserves such. But the point remains, Rather was done in by his own ambition, arrogance and meanness. That, regardless of how many flowers he sent was the fatal weakness.

Any also, Rather simply exemplifies what is so wrong about the main stream follow the leader type of thinking. It lacks the nuance of self doubt that all embrace when faced with certain moral clarity. We simply can't claim it for ourselves, cause we know how fallable we are. Dan didn't grasp this.

Most conservatives can at least respect a morally consistent opinion from a lefty, (thinking of Hentoff or Hitchens) while not accepting many of the premises, we can respect that kind of writing. Can't think that Dan could actually do a piece of the sort Peggy did for him, on Nixon. So meanness won Dan, and Peggy is wasting her verbal flowers on him. But life is tough.

[shezza]

As I mentioned on the other thread:

Here's how it got done: When I had been doing the show for a few weeks I could see that my work was not good--uneven, without voice, without a clear point of view. I thought I knew the reason. I had become increasingly a political conservative. Dan, it was obvious to me, was a sort of establishment liberal--not a wild leftist and not an ideologue, but whatever smart liberals thought was more or less what he wound up thinking, and saying. I couldn't write his views well, because I didn't buy them and didn't fully understand them. I couldn't write my views, because the show had to reflect his thinking. So I went to him and told him my problem. He was great. He said: On any given issue that we discuss, give the liberal point of view fairly and give the conservative point of view fairly, and then we'll end it with my opinion, because it's my show. I thought that sounded good.

And it worked. "Dan Rather Reporting" actually got something of a conservative following, not because it was a conservative show--it wasn't--but because it actually put forward the conservative point of view in what might be called a fair and balanced way.

Aha! So Dan Rather owed his success to Peggy Noonan's brilliant writing, who made his show "fair and balanced" and drew a large conservative audience because of that. It was her words, her script, that made him a success. After she left, his looney liberal rantings took center stage and his ratings began to slip. I hope Dan sent YOU some flowers, Peggy, because you did the impossible: Made a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

[bert]

"The old network hegemony is over"

The implications of these 6 words are immense. This succinct statement sums the hundreds, perhaps thousands of posts to media bias threads.

[aculeus]

Worth reading for what she says ... about Richard Nixon.

[1Old Pro]

Bottom line, Dan was an elitist liberal and his shaping of stories and teleprompter reading reflected that. America moved away from him.

[cjshapi]

Different than my usual pings, but this is a wonderfully crafted piece. A great read.

[BibChr]

I wouldn't agree that she "captures" it.

I think it's an almost even-handed essay. The credit she gives him is, I think, fair. But she goes too easy on the fault he deserves, and the blame and reproach he has richly earned.

Dan (not Rather)

[Revolting cat!]

For three years, from 1981 through 1984, I wrote his daily radio commentary, a four-minute essay with a one-minute spot that went out to all the CBS affiliates and network-owned stations.

Somehow, dear old Peggy,sees nothing wrong with this picture. She (and others before and after her stint) ghost writes for Blather, he signs his name under her writing, and based on it he, not the nameless ghostwrites develops a reputation as a journalist, why, a genius of sorts. Pathetic panegyric by a member of the establishment mafia.

If you cut out the bullcrap you'd say that this so-called journalist is/was nothing more than a lucky simpleton with deep voice, good looks and confident manner, no different only luckier than any news reader on any local station in this country. News reader, Peggy, that's what the Brits call them.