Also Ronin owes FreeRepublic $100 because he bet me and another FReeper $50 each that Dan would resign by now.
Ronin should have read Bias, by Bernie Goldberg, befor making that bet. If he had, he'd know that Dan Rather is far, far too arrogant to immediately resign over something like this. He'll spend the next few months trying to crush anyone who questions him on this issue.
But along the way I think he also became cynical and suspicious of any criticism. "Dan Rather can't distinguish between mainstream, legitimate criticism and criticism coming from extremists. It's all the same to him," is what Heyward told me after my op-ed came out.This character trait, observed in Chapter 15 of Bias two years ago, is precisely what made it utterly impossible for Rather to listen to the people in his own organization who questioned the authenticity of these documents, and what makes it utterly impossible for Rather to back down now.And after the dark days of Richard Nixon, when Dan was constantly under siege, I believe he started seeing even well-meaning critics as enemies. Anyone who said there was a liberal bias on our news broadcasts was an extremist, practically by definition, as far as Dan was concerned. Every critic was a Richard Nixon lining Dan up in his sights. I think a little of Nixon's paranoia rubbed off on Dan.