Dan Rather took the best seat in the house that Murrow built and then left the place a ruin. Now he has returned to torch the rubble.
...Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly found yourself 75 and toiling for an obscure cable operation that seemed to generate more press releases than viewers, it probably would be much more satisfying to see yourself as the victim of an intricate, high-level conspiracy than as someone undone by the kind of personal screw-up that would make a first-year reporter blush.
The problem is that there's more than one guy's injured vanity at play here. In fact, the adjectives that come to mind as you assess the substance of what Rather now has done are wanton, reckless and irresponsible...
...It's a somber thing to see the ruined house that Murrow built now reduced to a shabby backdrop for the last act in the ego theater of Dan Rather.
Ouch! And Rather doesn't get any more sympathy from Rutten's L.A. Times colleague, Mary McNamara, in her Critic's Notebook, "Dan Rather wanders too far off script."
If Dan Rather is going to set himself up as our last defense against corporate corruption of news organizations, he's going to have to get better writers.
..."The facts of the story were true," he told King. ". . . No one has proved those documents were a forgery."
What really happened, he seemed to say, was that the pro-Bush leaders of CBS and its parent company, Viacom, angry over the piece, as a well as a "60 Minutes" look at Abu Ghraib, put Rather on the chopping block to appease the White House.
Not that he quite came out and said this. Rather came off at times too choked by indignation to be clear, at others as if he were reading from a legal brief....Rather, though verbose, seemed at a loss for real talking points, lapsing instead into self-indulgent and maddening asides rather than sticking to the story.
Finally, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post skeptically writes that "Discussing His Lawsuit Against CBS, Dan Rather Is Sticking to His Story."
Rather disputed the notion that he was portraying himself as a mere newsreader on the National Guard story, uninvolved in the key decisions that were made. Still, he says top CBS executives bore responsibility for the piece.
"Anybody who knows me knows I love to report," he said. "I did what I could on this story." But he said he was busy at the time covering a hurricane, the Republican convention and Bill Clinton's heart ailment, along with his anchoring duties.
"Andrew Heyward took over the supervising of this piece," Rather said. "They didn't invite me, ask me, inform me when the final screening took place. I wasn't as deeply involved as I normally am." He said he had warned Heyward that "reaction to it could be thermonuclear."
But Josh Howard, the former executive producer of "60 Minutes II," said Wednesday that Rather was deeply involved in the story, to the point of arguing over every line in the script.
Across the television industry, executives are asking: Why now? Why, when memories of the botched story are finally fading and Rather is trying to build a second career, would he declare legal war on his former bosses and dredge up the worst moment of his career?
Despite the underwhelming support that Rather is receiving in the MSM, there is one bright spot for him. The moonbat left is enthusiastically supporting Rather to the point of hallucinatory fanaticism. In both the Democratic Underground and the Daily Kos the cheerleading for Rather can best be described as comically delusional as can be seen from this sampling of their unintentional comedy act:
My first thoughts. This might lead to some interesting places. I am envisioning a renewed investigation with airtime. And in fact, maybe even impeachment? Am I dreaming???
The only reason that the report is found to be unsubstantiated is that insiders to the Bush Evil Empire were put in place as a "news team" evaluating the piece.
WHAT? No Rove Implication??? The whole thing stunk to high heaven and had Rove's name written all over it.
The story was, of course, true, but the Killian documents being unable to be authenticated independently gave the far right water-carriers enough ammo to sweep the entire story under the rug.
Though the documents from that 60 Minutes 2 broadcast may have been discredited, the claims made by Rather still seem to have been true.
The evidence of forgery is overwhelming. Probably planted by Karl Rove to make the story go away, then leaked to LGF and the other Encyclopedia Brownshirts.
You can read a lot more of the leftwing blogosphere howling their support for Dan Rather at the moon in the DUmmie FUnnies. However, a word of warning: don't be eating anything while reading their delusional postings or you could choke while laughing.
