When the Anchor Drops (Dan Rather BITTER ALERT)

Washington Post ^ | 6/27/06 | Art Buchwald

[beyond the sea]

Goodbye to Dan Rather. He was a good man and served CBS for 44 years with distinction.

Television is a tough business. When it's time to go, you go . And if you don't go the way they want you to, they get very upset. They tell the world you weren't a very good anchorman to start with and you stuttered a lot. Also, you weren't very sincere on the air.

CBS, like other television networks, has a tremendous public relations staff. It's bigger than the news staff. The job of the PR department is to portray the network in a very good light and, when someone's number is up, show how he or she was very bad at reading news copy.

[Buckeye McFrog]

...and Buchwald is a man who knows his typewriters!!

[gusopol3]

Tongue-in-cheek alert!! Tongue-in-cheek alert!!! Buchwald's on our side in this one! Enjoy the satire> I thought Buchwald was deep into retirement, but he is a real old-timer , and probably a Dem something like Ed Koch . He was an op-ed fixture in many papers for decades.

[gusopol3]

lol.

[beyond the sea]

Yep, Art was darn funny.

[N. Theknow]

He was an op-ed fixture in many papers for decades.

Best line I remember from Art was after the 18 minute gap showed up in the Nixon tapes after his secretary, Rosemary Woods, had been transcribing them.

Haldeman, Erlichman, Mitchell and Dean,
The tapes will show that the Prez is clean.
If they don't, then heaven knows,
The answer lies in Rosemary's toes.

Now why the Hell would I remember that after 30 some odd years?

[nyconse]

Art Buchwald used to be very funny once upon a time.

[gusopol3]

here's another good one I just picked up in National Review, which reprinted WFB's remarks at Galbraith's funeral : "..in 1972, we were pitted against each other (WFB and Galbraith)at a huge affair, he advancing the candidacy of George McGovern,I that of Richard Nixon. The Master of Ceremonies was Art Buchwald. It was a week or two after Senator McGovern had dismissed vice- presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton. "The important question before the house," Buchwald began thunderously, evoking a public reaction to incumbent vice president Spiro Agnew, " is: are we better off with a vice president who has been treated for mental illness or with one who hasn't?"