Free Republic

Today is September 9, the first anniversary of "Rathergate." It was at 7:51 on the morning of Sept. 9, 2004, that Scott hit the "save" button on the original version of "The Sixty-First Minute", which discussed the 60 Minutes program on President Bush's National Guard service that had aired the previous evening, along with the DNC's advertising campaign on the same subject that was beginning on the morning of Sept. 9. At the end of his post--now the most famous post in the young history of the blogosphere--Scott included a quote and a link to a Free Republic post by...

I hate vanities, but I thought that today and last night deserved recognition for being the one year anniversary of TankerKC and Buckhead blowing the CBS ANG document story out of the water. As we all know, this ultimately led to the disgracing of Dan Rather and rapidly advanced the already slow-moving demise of the MSM as a monopoly.

In a televised interview with former CBSer Marvin Kalb, retired CBS anchor Dan Rather stated that his network will not allow him to continue to pursue the story of President Bush's Air Guard service. "Straight-up, no chaser, no," the exiled anchor said when asked if he would consider filing a story about it on the "60 Minutes" news magazine since he continues to believe in it. "CBS News doesn't want me to do that story. They wouldn't let me do that story," Rather said, declining to elaborate further. (See it in WMV or RealMedia video.) Rather also expressed suspicion about...

NEW YORK In the upcoming December issue of Vanity Fair, Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer who lost her job after the disputed "60 Minutes II" Bush/National Guard report, writes, "I must answer the bloggers, the babblers and blabbers, and the true believers who have called me everything from 'feminazi' to an 'elitist liberal' to an 'idiot.' "If I was an idiot, it was for believing in a free press that is able to do its job without fear or favor. ...I didn't know that the attack on our story was going to be as effective as a brilliantly run...

In her first interview since being fired, former CBS News producer Mary Mapes maintains that her controversial "60 Minutes II" story on President Bush's National Guard service was "true" and that "no one has proved that the documents were not authentic."... In her interview with ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, to be broadcast Wednesday morning on "Good Morning America," Mapes says she is unrepentant about her role. "I don't think I committed bad journalism. I really don't," she says.... Mapes says Rather did not have "any obligation to resign" from his position, as CBS correspondent Mike Wallace recently...

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used...

NEW YORK -- With its official-looking BBC News banner, the Web site looked real enough, but the sick tale it told seemed too preposterous to be true. "Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight," blared the headline. An article followed about a circus-like spectacle that went awry and resulted in many deaths. The page was a hoax, but it exploded across the Internet. Soon it was being repeated by bloggers, radio show hosts and a few newspapers. The New York Post published the yarn in its "Weird but True" column on May 20. The episode was another in a string...

After initially putting the first chapter of fired CBS producer Mary Mapes's book, Truth and Duty, on its web site, Amazon.com has apparently pulled the plug on the enterprise. Visitors to the online book retailer can no longer read the excerpt as it no longer shows up in listings for the print or audio versions of the book.Was the excerpt yanked because of the several objectively incorrect assertions it contained, and the subsequent blog firestorm their exposition caused? Only Amazon or Mapes's publisher, St. Martin’s Press knows for sure.

CBS News: "It's been ten years since that oddly public passionate kiss at the Democratic convention. That was followed by Gore winning the popular vote for President but losing the electoral vote. Family friend Sally Quinn says that may have done the marriage irreparable harm."

RatPac, Echo Lake and FilmNation have boarded the Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett project James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's...

Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (AIM), commented that, "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. 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." AIM and Romerstein drew attention to another bombshell...

Fox News host Laura Ingraham blasted former Vice President Dick Cheney Thursday after he visited Capitol Hill for the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. "The dinosaurs of the Pelosi-Schumer age are about to go extinct," Ingraham said. "They know their political con game is coming to an end in November, and they're so petrified that Trump or someone with similar views will win the presidency in 2024 that they're even willing to team up with an old nemesis [Dick Cheney]." [cut] The "dinosaurs" of the Cheney era "really care more about promoting democracy abroad than preserving it...

On Christmas Eve, Dr. Anthony Fauci turned 81. However, he is not retiring just yet. If he did, Fauci would reap the largest federal retirement package in U.S. history. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com estimate Dr. Fauci’s annual retirement would exceed $350,000. Thereafter, his pension and benefits would continue to increase through annual cost-of-living adjustments. Fauci has 55 years of service as a federal employee. For the second year in a row, Fauci was the most highly compensated federal employee and out earned the president, four star generals, and roughly 4.3 million of his colleagues. As director of the National Institute...

Muh shots!

Liz Cheney is going to New Hampshire. She's getting her political operation in order. And she's raising money like mad from icons of the Republican Party. The Wyoming congresswoman is clearly exploring her political options and power well beyond her congressional district, even if she's not talking openly about a run for president. "I've never had a conversation with her about 2024," said Eric Edelman, a former ambassador, Pentagon official and adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney. "If there was going to be a Never Trump candidate, I can't think of anyone better." Eight months after she voted to...

I Warned You About What We’re Living Through TodayJan 7, 2021 RUSH: Hey, folks, it’s great to be back. Really great to be back, and I need to ask you a favor. I need to you to give me a few minutes here just to get my sea legs. This has been a very, very bad couple of weeks for me. I don’t want to get into any more detail about it. Those of you have been through this know exactly what I’m talking about. But it has not been a break in the sense that it hasn’t been restful...

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist of former President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, dropped his bid for Texas lieutenant governor on Tuesday, pointing to an emerging field of diverse candidates vying for the number two position in the Lone Star State. In a statement announcing his decision to end his candidacy, Dowd, who was running as a Democrat, cited an opinion piece he wrote for ABC News in 2018 titled “Us white male Christians need to step back and give others room to lead.” In the article, Dowd called for more diversity in electoral politics, writing “white male Christians...

Writing for NBC in October, Ashley Pratte Oates, communications strategist and board member, Republican Women for Progress, accused Trump of “hijacking” the GOP with his continued influence. “While it’s disheartening to see these elected officials lambasted and pushed out of a party they’ve desperately—and bravely—tried to fix, it also should serve as a final wake-up call for leadership: The GOP is no longer the GOP of the Bushes, Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney and John McCain. It is now the party of Trump,” Pratte Oates said.

Back in September, Old Joe Biden’s teleprompter offered some reassurance to the American people: “Planes taking off from Kabul are not flying directly to the United States. .. we are conducting thorough scrutiny — security screenings for everyone who is not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident.” Will it really surprise you, after ten months of this hard-Left, habitually dishonest administration, to discover that he was lying? The reality is that almost none of the 82,000 Afghans who are now in the United States after being airlifted out of Kabul in August were vetted first. There could be...

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening. I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence –...