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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.)
And he proved with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist!
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As I recall, it took the "guys in the basement in pajamas" less than a day to start questioning the validity of the printed records. If rather Dan is right (no, he's really left) they were typed on the beta version company of the future Microsoft on the really beta version of WORD on a computer that wasn't even a beta prototype at the time the documents were purported to be written. But that's alright Dan, we believe you -- now please just take your medicines and you'll feel a lot better.
He intentionally overlooks Free Repblic's (and some other online forums') finest hours.
Memo to Dan Rather. What a lying, deceitful, forgery-mongering fungus you are.
(And always will be).
Oh, and just so you know...Lying about deceit and lying doesn't make it better, it makes it worse. There is no recovery for whatever good name you might have had..
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The Rathergate unravelling was a high-watermark for FR......maybe the best work thats ever been done by people in pajamas
If I remember correctly, you could exactly duplicate the document by opening Word and typing using the default settings for font, margins, etc.
IOW, whoever forged it didn’t even bother to change the default settings. They just assumed the document would be accepted as real.
Prior to the Web, they would have been right.
maybe dan would like to investigate a certain birth certificate since he is an expert on forgeries.
we will show him this photo after the revolution and right before we put him up against the wall.
The font argument is iron-clad. But, if it weren’t, the formats of the memos (headings, alignment of signature etc) were from a standard establised around 1993.
Strike 2.
Dan must not think anyone watches him. I caught a part of that broadcast in which he had his source on to interview. Dan asked the guy about him vetting his sources and information to which the guy basically said that he hadn't done any confirmation of information and that he had expected CBS to do it. The look on old Dan's face was priceless.
Not to mention that the source had been presented as "unimpeachable" the week before and had been kept secret presumably to keep him from being killed by the Bush cabal. Then a week later brought him out. Either keeping him anonymous was done just because he was an unreliable source or Dan "burned" a source by endangering his life. Either way it's something an honest journalist doesn't do.
A Dan Rather with his reputation in tact could have destroyed Obama with one show.
Interesting that Rather cancelled an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Maybe he didn’t want to answer some tough questions.
Off the meds again, Dan?
(Now Claims Rathergate Dcuments Were Genuine)
***Genuine but Fake but Accurate, yeah right
Let me spell it out for you Kenneth ..
Bookmark.
Faster. In fact one of the Ratherist "defences" against the FR analysis was that Freepers were crying "fake" in posts timemarked before the CBS segment went to air. OF course FR posts are timemarked Pacific time and the program ran 3 hours earlier on the East coast. IIRC correctly the MS-Word computer overlay match using the pdfs from the CBS website was one item that beat Hollywood Time.
I love that story :-); good for you.
I have to admit that it was a fun thing to do. At least his neighbors saw it!
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