Rathergate: The forgotten cover-up – Part I (long but good!)

If journalistic fraudulence and treason were actual prosecutable offenses today, there wouldn’t be enough jails cells to hold the thousands of Blame-America-First media leftists like Dan Rather who continually betray our country through their anti-American sentiment, which manifests itself regularly through their hatred of President Bush, the U.S. military and the softball defense of anti-U.S. Democrats Ted Kennedy, Robert “KKK” Byrd, John Kerry and other like-minded political terrorists who hate America.

“Had this happened anywhere but America, [Dan] Rather would have lost his job on the spot, been investigated for his role in the forging of government documents, and most likely, ended up in prison,” said J.B. Williams, Mensnewsdaily.com (Nov. 24, 2004). “In some parts of the world, he would have been dragged from his throne by his hair, stoned to death in the streets and set afire.

“If he had behaved this way with his old friend Saddam Hussein, he would have had his eye’s gouged out, his fingers cut off, and his tongue ripped out by a log chain tied to the back bumper of Qusay’s Hummer,” Williams said.

To date, the anti-U.S. media wing of the Democratic Party still tries to quell Rathergate, which has been one of the biggest media scandals in U.S. history since CNN executive Eason Jordan admitted in a April 2003 New York Times op-ed to striking a deal with Saddam Hussein for 12 years by agreeing to hide Hussein’s Iraqi atrocities of mass graves, rape rooms, children’s prisons, gas chambers and meat grinders, as well as torture against CNN employees who didn’t toe the line.

This is the same Eason Jordan who, at the recent leftist-funded Davos session, accused our U.S. military of intentionally “targeting” journalists. Jordan later denied it. But the CNN spin machine has now alleged that Jordan wasn’t clear in his remarks, despite the numerous other real journalists who were there to confirm Jordan’s inflammatory claims.

While CNN’s 12-year treachery occurred mostly under Bill Clinton’s watch – and up until the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, CNN, a.k.a, the Clinton News Network, kissed up to Saddam Hussein to keep its despotic propaganda bureau in Baghdad.

Now, Rather’s media friends, like MSNBC’s leftist conspiracy theorists and major nut cases, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, have shrugged off Rather’s duplicity as merely a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” instead of calling Rather’s mendacity last fall what it really was: A deliberate attempt to damage another Republican president by aiding and abetting John Kerry in stealing yet another legitimate election from Bush.

In the same way CNN and Dan Rather were helping Bill Clinton avoid confronting Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in the 1990s by becoming a willing mouthpiece for them, CNN and Dan Rather were actually helping John Kerry end the war on terrorism that their current Republican nemesis, George W. Bush, has been winning.

Keep in mind: The only times Dan Rather chose to “interview” Saddam Hussein were under the Republican presidencies of George H.W. Bush (August 1990) and George W. Bush (February 2003); never on Bill Clinton’s watch, where 19 hijackers spent over two years planning the Sept. 11 attacks, especially since Clinton was busy with his numerous scandals, namely Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky – and had been warned several times about a terrorist presence in the U.S. many years before Bush II ever took office.

This speaks a lot to Rather’s partisan motives in protecting Clinton from political fallout in the 1990s, juxtaposed to embarrassing Bush before the Arab world just one month before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 when Rather gave and comfort to the enemy by granting “Mr. President,” as Rather repeatedly called Hussein, five minutes to bizarrely challenge Bush to a debate, as Rather let Hussein to do with Bush I in 1990.

But after schlepping for the Democratic Party his entire career, Rather finally got his day in the court of public opinion and may actually be held accountable for his 42 years of leftist promulgation, thanks to the real journalists of the Fox News Channel, talk radio and the Internet. After all, this New Media revolution has skillfully exposed Rather’s dishonesty, causing him to implode over his loss of power, influence and credibility, particularly since he no longer sets the agenda for what he tries to pass off as news.

In the course of four decades, Rather, who has never flinched at – nor exposed – the bloody regimes of Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, has purposely slanted every single Republican administration’s foreign policies that have sought to rid the world of the very barbaric tyrants Rather has coddled – especially when Republicans have resolved to stop these mass murderers from shedding more innocent blood.

In effect, the leftist media have had their own version of anti-American propagandist Michael Moore in Dan Rather, who joins other anti-U.S. media cabals that seek America’s destruction via the political lynching of Republican presidents like Bush that implement our military strength to justifiably bring down murderous dictators and their terrorist thugs, who are almost sadistically admired by media leftists like Rather.

While Rather & Co. had tried to paint the now-discredited, fabricated memos not only as true but also as an allegedly diabolical plot by the White House to conceal Bush’s alleged “preferential treatment,” Rather ended up exposing himself as one of the nation’s most sinister Democrat media operatives, who’s been more interested in pushing anti-U.S. propaganda than telling the truth about the U.S. After all, the Abu Ghraib photos – Rather’s warm-up and lead-in for the bogus memos – fulfilled his goal of humiliating Bush, the military and, ultimately, the U.S. Undeniably, Rather wanted to ruin Bush by doing the most political damage possible to his reputation without fear of getting caught.

Yet almost immediately after Rather was caught waving fabricated memos on national television, as if in harmony, it was also later discovered that CBS News was colluding with the New York Times to manufacture another hoax involving 380 tons of allegedly missing weapons in Al Qaqaa. CBS News and the Times had intentionally made up the story that the U.S. military somehow let “looters” steal the weapons in broad daylight.

Despite knowing that the weapons were gone long before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, CBS News and the Times ignored the fact that it would have taken whoever had stolen them – likely Saddam and his thugs – over two weeks to move them out of Al Qaqaa, according to New York Post military writer Ralph Peters (Oct. 28, 2004). Rather and his fellow anti-U.S. cohorts at the Times never once reported that coalition forces had already confiscated and destroyed more than 400,000 tons of explosives.

What’s more, CBS News itself reported on April 4, 2003, that there were no explosives at Al Qaqaa. Also, according to Mensnewsdaily.com (Nov. 1, 2004), “CBS’ earlier report set the last date of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection as Feb. 18, 2003, not March 16 of that year. IAEA has since claimed that its last inspection at the depot was on Jan. 14, 2003.”

In the worst-case scenario possible, if, in fact, Rather was able to take out Bush last fall, it unfortunately would have paved the way for anti-American leftist John Kerry to get elected and subsequently pull out our troops prematurely from Iraq. Therefore, we never would have seen eight million Iraqis freely vote for democracy and 50 million free. What’s more, without the New Media of Fox News, talk radio and Internet bloggers, Rather never would have been caught, since Rather was pulling for Kerry. Therefore, under a possible Kerry administration, we never would have experienced the Arab world’s very first free election because it never would have taken place on Kerry’s watch.

Ultimately, if Rather were successful at destroying Bush’s re-election bid, Rather would have been responsible for the Arab world not tasting freedom because there wouldn’t have been an election because Kerry would have pulled out our troops and the country probably would have plunged into civil war. Without Bush and the military, democracy never would have happened because Kerry wouldn’t have permitted it. But that’s exactly the point: Rather wanted Kerry to win so he could end democracy in the Arab world, which is also why Rather never exposed Kerry as an anti-military fraud and traitor.

Despite unfair criticism from divisive Democrats and their media supporters, Vice President Dick Cheney was right: If Kerry were elected, this country would have been vulnerable to another terrorist attack because, like Clinton, Kerry would have first gutted the military and never would have confronted the terrorists; instead, Kerry would have chosen enemy appeasement. In turn, Rather would have had more innocent blood on his hands for not telling the truth about Kerry, especially if the New Media never existed.

But, in the end, Rather has always launched partisan attacks against Republicans without warning by using false and misleading information in order to destroy their characters and political careers, and eventually, hurt the U.S. by costing the lives of our troops.

Recall Rather’s June 2, 1988 Michael Moore-style “documentary,” “CBS Reports: The Wall Within,” supposedly revealing the “truth” about Vietnam atrocities. But there was just one problem: It was all a lie, like the bogus memos Rather tried to pass off as real.

B.G. Burkett, a Vietnam veteran and author of “Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of its Heroes and its History,” spoke at the Vietnam Veterans for the Truth rally at the U.S. Capitol Grounds on Sept. 9, 2004, where he exposed Rather’s “documentary” as being laced with lies about Vietnam veterans.

“We’ve seen Dan Rather pop up with a bunch of documents supporting John Kerry,” Burkett said. “The documents were forged. But what did he say? ‘We stand by our story.’ Many years ago, when I was doing my research on Vietnam veterans, [Rather] did a documentary. He portrayed them as assassins. One fellow in the documentary said he was a 16-year old Navy Seal who killed village chiefs. I got the records of those men and five of them just made it up. When Reader’s Digest confronted them, what did they say? ‘We stand by our story,’ like Rather did with the fabricated memos.

“But you know what they did?” Burkett said about the five men who willfully lied in Rather’s “documentary.” “They went into the video stores and they withdrew all those videos. They never admitted that they did anything wrong.”

“This is a man who said for years he’s a two-tour Marine. He joined the Marine Corps after college and after he couldn’t get drafted for Korea. He couldn’t get through the physical activity. He was kicked out of the Marine Corps after four months,” Burkett said.

“Americans have to understand the bias of the press,” he said. “You have to look very hard to find a journalist who seeks the truth and reports the news. CBS ought to change its name to the “Kerry Broadcasting Company.”

Since Kerry and other pro-Communists were railing against America, while offering aid and comfort to the enemy, Rather naturally believed Kerry’s patently false tales of atrocities without question or challenge, despite not bothering to use the Freedom of Information Act to check their military records to find out if they were telling the truth.

“Why would Dan Rather do such a thing?” asked National Review’s Ann Morse (Sept. 15, 2004). “Partly because the stories of deranged, trip-wire vets [are] much more dramatic than the true story: That most Vietnam veterans came home to live normal, productive, happy lives. Second, Rather apparently wanted the story of whacked-out Vietnam veterans to be true – just as he now wants the Jerry Killian story to be true.

“Perhaps Vietnam veterans ought to take a page out of the book of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and air television ads exposing Rather’s deceits – something along the lines of: “Dan Rather lied about his Vietnam documentary. I know. I was there. I saw what happened. When the chips were down, you could not count on Dan Rather.” Certainly, we cannot count on him for the truth,” Morse wrote.

These kinds of Democrat-inspired, partisan attacks on Republicans by Rather were always meant to strike fear in Americans in order to turn them against the U.S. and their Republican leaders who sought to bring democracy to those enslaved by totalitarian governments – the very murderous regimes Rather has always sought to appease.

That’s where Rather’s apparent anti-Americanism stems from: His recorded history of always siding against the U.S. in his quest to destroy Republican administrations, as he tried to do with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and now George W. Bush. Only this time, in his “myopic zeal” to get Bush, Rather went too far and should face criminal charges. After all, while Rather and executive producer Mary Mapes tried for five years to find the slightest incriminating evidence in Bush’s National Guard record, most already knew there was none. But instead of admitting defeat, Rather continued to superciliously scoff – especially at the bloggers and media critics he hypocritically accused of acting as “partisan political operatives.”

But Rather is really no different than the fictitious character of TV “journalist” Murphy Brown, who was played by Candace Bergen, who, in the fall of 1992, used her show to purposely sway public opinion against the re-election of George H.W. Bush to co-presidents Bill and Hillary Clinton. When Murphy Brown (and Candace Bergen) accused then-Vice President Dan Quayle of hating single mothers, the feminists listened.

By targeting Bush II, Rather isn’t only trying to thwart democracy but also validating murderous dictators who have enjoyed Rather’s company at one time or another; namely, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. While Rather has always defended these murderous thugs and sought their friendship, he has also sought to undermine the U.S. by crucifying Republican presidents, with this latest Rathergate as just another example.

As a result of Rather’s increasing credibility problems, an estimated 746,000 viewers, or a 9 percent, have already tuned out the CBS Evening “News,” according to Nielsen Media Research, when compared to the same time period last year.

Short of becoming a human shield for Abu Masub al-Zarqawi or a star defense witness for his hero and confidant, Saddam Hussein, Dan Rather has done just about everything humanly possible to humiliate the U.S. and Republican administrations, especially the Bush Administration, while distorting the facts and figures to turn public opinion against the war in Iraq. Rather’s anti-U.S. mentor Walter Cronkite did just that when he called for America’s defeat in Vietnam, claiming that “the daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth [it].”

In fact, the anti-American angst fueled by the Left from the premature, unauthorized release of the Abu Ghraib photos by “60 Minutes” was just a prelude to what Rather would later unleash as a pre-October Surprise, when he deliberately attempted to take out Bush, while carrying water for Kerry, by knowingly using bogus Texas Air National Guard memos just weeks before the most historic presidential election in U.S. history.

“[Dan] Rather’s reference to Abu Ghraib, in the context of preparing the bogus attack on Bush, demonstrates that the agenda of Rather and CBS was not only to sabotage Bush’s re-election campaign but to undermine the war in Iraq,” observed Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (1/12/05). “They were looking for ‘big’ stories to hurt the U.S. at home and abroad. The Abu Ghraib story on CBS inflamed the Arab/Muslim world against the U.S., inevitably costing the lives of more American soldiers in Iraq at the hands of fanatical Muslim terrorists.”

With the Abu Ghraib prison photos, Rather nearly accused President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and Condoleezza Rice of holding the leash, alongside Pvt. Lynndie England. From the New York Times’ 50-plus front-page stories to Rather, CNN and MSNBC hyping it into an international scandal, the leftist media drooled over the news. Despite the Pentagon’s plea to CBS not to air the photos, Rather and Mapes aired them anyway, which most likely had caused the deaths of U.S. contractors in Fallujah.

Further investigating Rather’s maliciousness, AIM consulted with Herbert Romerstein, a retired government expert on anti-American and Communist propaganda activities.

Kincaid said Romerstein understood how misleading, deceptive and false news reports in the U.S. and foreign media could undermine the U.S. position in the world, and what the revelations say about the agenda of Rather, Mapes and their collaborators.

“They had a political agenda,” said Romerstein, who also headed the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency, of Rather, Mapes and CBS News. “They demonstrated it with the Abu Ghraib story and the Bush National Guard story. They wanted to damage the administration and the war effort.”

Moreover, along with two CBS document experts who strongly urged Rather and Mapes (a known Bush-hater who okayed the airing of the Abu Ghraib photos) the day before the Sept. 8, 2004 broadcast not to use them, Dr. Joseph Newcomer, a modern electronic typesetting expert, concluded that the four documents were indeed “modern forgeries.”

But when Rather’s accomplices at Newsweek and Time flatly ignored Newcomer’s analysis he sent to them, Newcomer posted his findings on his Web site and soon everyone knew what Rather’s defenders pompously refused to concur: That the so-called “objective” CBS newsman actually thought he could get away with “the opportunity to affect the election” as Mapes said when she contacted Kerry campaign advisor Joe Lockhart on behalf of fellow Bush-hater, Democrat Bill Burkett.

Now, the non-partisan Center for Individual Freedom has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, charging CBS News, John Kerry and John Edwards with “illegal coordination” with “60 Minutes” to commit campaign fraud, since both were working together to influence the outcome of a presidential election by deceiving voters.

The truth is, Rather and Mapes were hyperventilating over their orchestrated Bush lynching, not just because they knew the memos were phony, but also because they both wanted their five-year coordinated anti-Bush hoax to pay off. Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, they still wanted the phony memos to be true. Rather and Mapes were never interested in being fair or accurate; they just wanted to get something on Bush, no matter what price they had to pay to get it. For Mapes, it was her job; for Rather, his already soiled reputation, although he also should have been fired.

The reason Rather had shown usual constraint after having been exposed as a fraud was likely because he knew he had been a willing participant in committing this felony. Instead, CBS brass allowed Rather to save some face by relegating him to where the scam first aired: “60 Minutes II,” with Mapes as Rather’s scapegoat. If Rather had any common decency at all, he would have taken responsibility and resigned. But, like his friend Bill Clinton (who refused to resign before his impending impeachment), instead of doing the right thing, Rather still remains the Ted Baxter of network news; allowing everyone else to take the fall, while he covers his tracks without consequence.

In fact, speaking of Rather’s scapegoats, “Rather was faulted for his role in last fall’s ill-fated story about President Bush’s military service, for which the network is ousting [three] news division staffers,” Newsmax.com reported on Feb. 2.

According to the New York Post (Jan. 27), the three CBS News executives who were asked to resign in early January still haven’t quit and aren’t going quietly. In fact, Josh Howard, Betsy West and Mary Murphy have hired lawyers; they aren’t even showing up for “work” and “could be threatening wrongful dismissal lawsuits as they negotiate severance packages.” Ironically, in light of the scandal that Rather and Mapes created, a CBS spokesman said “CBS refuses to comment on speculation.”

In effect, Rather and Mapes tried to pass off the bogus memos as mere “speculation.” They didn’t care about fairness or accuracy because, after all, the false claims that originated from Kerry campaign contacts were enough for them. In Rather and Mapes’ leftist minds, these false and misleading statements already validated their preconceptions about the Bush family and the president’s “privileged” upbringing. Even though Rather and Mapes knew Bush’s record was clean because of numerous sources close to Killian had already discredited the bogus memos, Rather, Mapes and other CBS executives involved in the fake story still wanted something to be there to justify their criminality.

Despite New Yorker magazine’s David Blum reporting that “more than a few suspected Rather let his political bias get in the way of his news judgment,” Howard, West and Murphy may have only been guilty by association and have become additional scapegoats for Rather’s overt hatred of Bush and the military.

“Elections have consequences,” the anchorman was overheard muttering before the ill-fated report, an apparent reference to his feelings about the crucial importance of ousting Bush,” Blum wrote.

This is exactly how Rather’s leftist propaganda against Bush snowballed into the scandal it is today: Rather had always had it in for Republican administrations, especially the Bushes, regardless of the facts.

But, like everything the Left’s media useful idiots like Rather do to seek revenge on those they despise, sooner or later, it always backfires, as Rather & Co. have found out with their self-imposed, mean-spirited, hate-mongering scandal. Only this time Rather was the one got struck in his own web of lies he had spun and he may never be able to get out.

Says it all............... almost.

Rather and his ilk eat sh*t.

Sorry, I'm sick of old media's conscious destruction of the country.

I wonder if that is what this is all about, Dan bruised ego for having been washed out of the marines twice.

They had a political agenda

Sadly true. But it continues today. That's the point of most every report STILL issuing from seeBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, even today. All of what he said about the effort to undermine, to crudely and viciously shape world events so that millions suffer rather than taste freedom, can be said just as well of the rest of the LM (or LWM if some prefer).

When all is said and done, I have formed the opinion that Rather did not want to know the truth of whether the TANG documents were fake. This allowed him to project his deniability, that he was just reporting "the news". But the way he did it backfired and bit him in the backside.

Additionally, during the Vietnam era, when Cronkite was doing the anchoring, Rather was his man in the field, ala Geraldo Rivera. I remember every night seeing him on the evening news with his in-the-field reports. His duplicity goes way back.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.