The Art of Politics

Dead Man Talking

If Dan Rather types a forged memo in the forest, and nobody reads it, does it make a sound?

As reality starts to sink in with Dan Rather and CBS News that they've been peddling a phony bill of goods, a more reticent, introspective Rather is emerging, now that he's been caught planting evidence on a suspect. More noise is being made that Rather may be walking the short plank on the issue as well.

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story. Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong'."

There's Scoop Rather for you - after he's laid out a political hit piece based largely on phony documents, he wants to be the one giving the hard-hitting interview to himself, asking himself the tough questions about what he knew, and when he knew it.

"This is not about me" - please, sir. Rather and CBS have made it definitively clear that it's all about them - their integrity, their gravitas, and their disdain for anyone outside the secret society that questions them.

"I recognize that those who didn't want the information out and tried to discredit the story are trying to make it about me, and I accept that."

Well, accepting IS the first step to recovery, Dan... and YOU discredited the story when you used cooked evidence to make your case. The pressure Rather feels is due to his own intransigent defense and haughty dismissal of anyone who pointed out that the Emperor has no clothes. CBS and Rather have continued to argue and deflect, stating that we need to accept their story at face value, and that our attention should be focused where they attempted to aim it.

Just ignore that man behind the curtain...

UPDATE: Dan Rather interviewing himself is not a recent phenomenon - and Bloom County was the greatest comic strip, EVER.

Posted by MEC2 at September 15, 2004 11:33 PM