Posted on 05/01/2012 6:47:53 AM PDT by MindBender26
Dan Rather just won’t let it go.
Nearly eight years after his fabled career at CBS News imploded like a death star over the notorious George W. Bush/Texas Air National Guard segment on 60 Minutes Wednesday, he can’t stop combing the debris for shards of vindication.
“I have a story to tell from my point of view,” he says about his new book, Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News, which roasts network management for its “spineless” behavior during the Bush episode; takes potshots at his successor in the CBS Evening News anchor chair, Katie Couric, as a purveyor of “News Lite”; and settles scores with former colleagues who, as he writes, “after pretending to be friends for all those years, stealthily snuck around giving anonymous newspaper quotes and otherwise scheming to put the dirk in deep when I was down and hurting.”
Rather explains: “I wanted to tell it as honestly and as candidly as I could with—as Lyndon Johnson used to say—the bark off.”
The Sept. 8, 2004, Bush segment and its use of dubious documents to bolster the case that the 43rd president benefited from family connections and then went AWOL during his Vietnam-era stint in a “champagne unit” of the guard, plus Rather’s subsequent lawsuit against the network he served for 44 years—24 of them as anchor and managing editor of CBS’s flagship news program—account for only a fourth of the book. Rather initially dug in his heels during the firestorm that accompanied his damning report on a sitting president two months before his reelection. But he ultimately apologized for airing widely debunked photocopies of purported memos critical of young Bush’s performance and allegedly written by his commanding officer, the late Jerry B. Killian, lieutenant colonel in the Texas Air National Guard, saying CBS News could no longer vouch for their authenticity.
A CBS-commissioned investigation of the disaster—headed by Richard Thornburgh, U.S. attorney general when Bush’s father was president, and Associated Press chief executive Louis D. Boccardi—faulted Rather and his top producer, Mary Mapes, among others, for their misplaced reliance on a dubious source and their sloppy vetting of the questionable documents, which should never have aired. They made the situation far worse, the investigation concluded, by defending the documents for nearly two weeks after the initial report—never mind the mounting evidence against them from the blogosphere, competitors in the mainstream media, and CBS’s own hired document experts. Five news executives and producers, including Mapes, lost their jobs in the aftermath, and 60 Minutes Wednesday was canceled.
But these days Rather insists the Killian memos were real. Pop Quiz
“I believe them to be genuine,” he tells The Daily Beast, holding forth in his corner office at his weekly HDNet magazine program, Dan Rather Reports, in a musty old building off Times Square. “I did at the time, I did in the immediate aftermath of it, and yes, I do now ... And I think the longer we go, nobody has ever proven that the documents were not what they purported to be, and after this length of time and given the controversy and high profile of it, my view is that if they were not genuine, by this time somebody would’ve come forward and said here’s the proof that they’re not. Nobody has done that.” (Unfortunately for Rather, nobody has come forward with proof that they are in fact legitimate, and the preponderance of the available evidence continues to cast doubt on their authenticity.)
I have to admit that it was a fun thing to do. At least his neighbors saw it!
He's worse than that. The documents were not only fake, they were really, really BAD fakes. If Dan is so stupid that he can't see that, he deserves pity, not scorn. Believe me, pity is far worse to a "newsman" than scorn.
And in this case, it was the little mess(ed up) boys running around in Dan’s head.
You can't prove a negative Danny Dipstick! The propaganda theory of repetition only works if you have an audience.
Think of all the power Rather had and for how long. Scary!
Dan Rather......
“They’re real! They’re real! You kids get off my lawn! Whose cat’s been crapping in my garden again?”
Or the frequency - he must have more to say about the frequency.
—They found a few with superscript and font, but they were special typewriters and the military buys things by the millions.—
Precisely.
And then there is Kerning.
However, even the typewriters of the day that DID do the superscript, etc. did not match the contents of the forgeries as precisely as Word versions did.
From my experience in the advertising trade, I'm familiar with those machines.
They were primarily employed by engraving and typesetting companies. They were huge -- filling an entire tabletop. They were massive...and obscenely heavy. And they printed their output on a tape, not on paper.
No way an ANG base ever had one of those. Complete red herring...
If Dan Rather believes the documents to be genuine he has never given a good explination as to why they look so fake.
Carry on. I’ll be in the area all day.
Fortunately for us, Dan Rather did successfully prove once and for all that the MSM was NOT what they purported to be.
-PJ
Gee! Even my proofreading needs proofreeding...
“For a deeper LOOK into...”
.....Or talk to some of us old CBS types who know many of the stories in Rather’s own books are BS, or about the time he took $20,000 from the Texas Dems to speak, when his dyke daughter was running for office.
We all heard about Cheny’s daughter, but about Rathers, NADA, and Cheney’s daughter is still a lady. Rather’s is Refrigerator Perry in a bad dress.
Printed on genuine paper.
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