Der Ratherdammerung - or "what happens when you don't fact-check, Dan.... "
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
Some patronizing clod with a cushy job for one of the major networks described bloggers' role in the current Dan Rather and his fake memos mess during a press-on-press interview as "fact checkers," eliciting a smug chuckle from his interviewer.

My friends, there were supposedly plenty of fact checkers on the job already. Dan Rather and the merry crew at CBS News had already checked the memos' authenticity thoroughly, remember?

After a number of document and forgery experts told CBS, "Wait a sec, I'm not attesting to anything regarding these documents!" CBS found a typewriter repairman who proceeded, in an interview with Dan Rather (that discerning, sceptical paragon of journalistic integrity) to emit a cloud of unknowing statements regarding the faked memos - that they couldn't be reproduced by modern computers... and so on.

Dan Rather nodded sagely at every bleat from his IBM Selectric expert - even though even Rather himself must have known the answers he was getting were crap through-and-through (or perhaps Rather is flown in daily from a lamasery in Tibet to do his show and is ignorant of such things as personal computers with image scanners and Paint Shop).

We're talking about a technology in every third American home which is used by vengeful 10 year-old boys nationwide to put their English teachers' faces on nude centerfolds' bodies for global Internet distribution. Sure, those memos could have been faked, and several document experts, and even a few non-expert bloggers did it themselves, just to show how it could be done.

And we also have what appear to have been carefully-arranged fallback positions from each successive alternate story:

- Mrs. Knox, who had already been outed as a rabid Bush-hater by the Dallas Morning News long before the 60 Minutes II interview in which she was cast by Dan Rather as everybody's meek, Zelnormed-out grandmother.

Even in response to slooooowwww softball-pitch "this is how we practiced it this afternoon" questions from Dan Rather, Mrs. Knox seemed to have trouble coming up with an answer that wasn't "I think," "I heard," or "I felt" to some very serious charges about then-Lieutenant Bush;

- Bill Burkett, who appears to be what historians might call "the ur-source of the Bush memo mythos," another Bush-hater who also has contributed a long and pungent series of political ravings on the Internet.

Libertarian blogger Michael Friedman has read and posted links to some of Burkett's observations and says:

"The issue here is not that Bill Burkett is a liberal. It isn't even that he is left wing. The issue is that he is loony left. We are in "precious bodily fluids" territory. I'm not calling Burkett a Democrat because I think he is too far left to be a Democrat. This is the left wing version of the John Birch Society.

"Not only are Bill Burkett's politics loony left but he is trying to be a political player, writing editorials and trying to sway the American people against George Bush and the Republican Party.

"Burkett's politics are certainly not common among members of any military service. Given this, isn't it a pretty amazing coincidence that someone with his political views just happened to be in the right place to overhear people talking about cleansing Bush's files?"

In an almost British-grade understatement, CBS now considers Burkett a source with "questionable integrity."

According to the Houston Chronicle, Burkett "has resolved to having his lawyer, Gabe Quintanilla, to speak on his behalf."

Rather's fallback positions all proved untenable, leaving Rather in the sorriest mess since Geraldo Rivera failed to unearth Al Capone's hidden stash on live TV - and all this despite Rather's having taken the elementary precaution to make sure there was something to show the folks at home.

At this point, we can imagine Mr. Rather doing a little off-camera venting:

(RATHER doing HOMER SIMPSON impression, growling:)

Stuuuupid educational system! How're you going to hoodwink a buncha Einsteins, anyway? We told the stupid teachers' unions - "keep 'em slow and dull! KEEP 'EM SLOW AND DULL!!"

But presumably, each and every one of those stories presented by Dan Rather and CBS News in the twilight of their journalistic godhood was also subjected to fact-checking.

Lord knows, CBS could afford to have whole building floors full of fact-checkers going over each of its stories if that were an urgent institutional priority. And we now know how urgent fact-checking is over there, don't we?

But sometimes the story is just too good, too "sexy," too... in line with your most cherished biases and preconceptions... to check very closely.

So you don't, and then there are all these people with computers and way too much time on their hands who do the checking you couldn't be bothered with, and you're out there with Geraldo, microphone in hand and nothing intelligent to say.

Nice one, Dan.

The late, great science-fiction comedy writer Douglas Adams once conceived of a planet that connived to ship off the "useless third" of its population - war-mongering military officers, movie producers, cosmeticians, phone sanitizers and the like - on a spaceship, on the pretext that the planet was doomed to cometary impact, and that the other two-thirds of the planet would be flying right behind them in more spaceships.

Bloggery is journalism with the useless two-thirds of the profession sent off to colonize another world under the pretext that an asteroid is going to strike Earth in 2012, evaporating all the booze and party ice.

I'll leave the exact identities and occupations of the colonizing fleet to your imagination, except to say that the most prominent national electronic journalists produced by the state of Texas and Molly Ivins are the bridge crew.

Those of us remaining are the "truth checkers."

"Repeat after me... there is no such thing as 'Cut and Paste,' there is no such thing as....
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
Dan Rather of CBS Evening News just interviewed a terribly mistaken person - not necessarily a complete, blithering idiot or another one of CBS's parade of shameless liars - on the Texas Air National Guard forgeries.

Rather's talking head (not going to embarrass him by mentioning his name) actually said that it was impossible for a computer to reproduce and manipulate text made by IBM Selectrics in the 1970s.

First, that's crap. Anyone can do exactly that with the Paint utility which came free with Windows 95 and later. Cut and paste, my friend, cut and paste.

Second, used office equipment shops all over the United States will only be too glad to fix you up with an old IBM typewriter which could reproduce those memos.

The next step would be to "stress" the document to simulate age. I'm sure the Daley Democratic machine in Chicago could help out there.

Your panic is showing, Mr. Rather. Next time get a teenage kid to help with those documents.

Confronting the CBS Evening News on their Election Coverage
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
(background: I'd just finished asking the CBS Evening News people to look up some footage they'd taken of my son, the soldier training at Fort Hood, and suddenly the indignation I'd felt today over the latest series of slanted innuendo-ridden substitutes for reporting got the better of me. Oh, well, maybe the PAO at Ft. Hood knows what I want and where to get it.

The letter I wound up sending after having smooched their butts earlier to try to get a tape of my son riding on an M-113):

Dear CBS Evening News:

I just asked you to help me find some footage your people took of my son while he was at Ft.Hood, TX training for deployment to Iraq, but read this letter first before you do so.

I'd understand if, after I told you what I think of your coverage of the election, you all felt you didn't owe me any favors. I suppose the Public Affairs Office at Ft.Hood could point me in the proper direction, anyway.

I have tried to give your program the benefit of the doubt regarding your objectivity in reporting the news until recent months; however, morally, I feel as though now I have to confront your writers, reporters, and above all, Mr. Rather.

To say that your coverage of this election is slanted is to understate the case grotesquely.

John Forbes Kerry has admitted under oath to having committed war crimes on multiple occasions before the Fulbright Committee. After coming home from Vietnam, not only did he protest the war, as was his perfect right, but he campaigned openly for American withdrawal from Southeast Asia, knowing that after that occurred Stalinist purges would occur from Cambodia, to Laos, to South Vietnam itself.

After the US withdrew from Southeast Asia, partly on the strength of Kerry's testimony before the Senate and partly owing to the strategy which Kerry apparently helped the North Vietnamese with during the Paris Peace Talks, one and a half million people perished in the resulting purges and flight from governments which Kerry described to the Senate as morally equivalent to our own.

In Congress, John Kerry repeatedly stated that the United States faced no danger from Communism, even though the Soviets:
- broke the ABM and SALT I treaties not long after signing them;
- soon after signing the Biological Weapons Protocol, embarked on a massive research, development and biological weapons production program which culminated in the mid-1980s with Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev's orders to fill ICBM warheads with weaponized smallpox and plague for launch at targets in the US and UK;
- embarked on an ambitious program to spread Sovietism throughout Central America and the Caribbean, interrupted only by decisive action from the US under Ronald Reagan - action denounced bitterly at the time by John Kerry and his colleagues in Congress.

John Kerry staunchly supported dictator Daniel Ortega and his violently repressive Sandinista clique until the voters of Nicaragua finally, emboldened by support from the United States, ejected that whole terrorist crew from power.

Where is the coverage of all these stories?

You people covered the President's inglorious but non-lethal and non-traitorous National Guard service until bone-cracking yawns from across the country got your advertisers' attention.

But when the Swifties showed up, you people decided that it wasn't necessary to report on THAT story except to elliptically debunk it. Why is that?

The excuse "They're Republicans" won't hold up - those pathetic disgruntled employees 60 Minutes likes to parade before their cameras each week are all Democrats, aren't they? If the Swifties' testimony is suspect because they choose to exercise their right to vote for and campaign for the candidates and party of their choice, and it turns out not to be John Kerry's party, then what about the 60 Minutes Book Plug of the Week Club?

(And where's the "Oops" we're all owed after Joe Wilson turned out to be full of crap, by the way?)

And what about the political affiliations of the CBS Evening News' editorial staff? If the Swifties' mere political affiliation can be used by you to throw doubt on their veracity, then how about your own? Their personal honor against your professional ethics?

At the very least, many of us viewers, regardless of our political party (I, myself, am a registered Libertarian) would really like to have the Swift Boat issue investigated, and not covered up.

If the Swift Boat Veterans for Justice turn out to be wrong, or even lying, wouldn't that be an impressive story - especially if Kerry were right and the Swifties accepted more than legal advice from the White House political team?

Your program's refusal to investigate what, regardless of what turned out to be true - a malfeasant Kerry or vindictively mistaken Swifties - would be a very big story makes many people suspect that you are covering up a sorry episode in John Kerry's past - once again.

And how about letting us know where the huge amount of soft money behind Kerry is coming from? How much money George Soros has in this campaign, and how his support of despots in former Soviet republics makes his choice to support John Kerry with massive infusions of soft money is perhaps a little troubling?

And what about the utter failure of McCain-Feingold to do what it was promised to be able to do - keep the rich and powerful from shouting out less well-funded voices come election time? As it now stands, McCain-Feingold couldn't have been more beneficial to the Democratic Party if it had been just "Feingold."

As a former police officer who was loath to arrest anyone unnecessarily and have to explain that lack of necessity on the paperwork afterward, why weren't the charges on which the "record number of protesteres" described on your program?

Was there an attempt on the part of your program to investigate whether there was actually an attempt on the part of the protesters to break the law in large numbers in order to create the large number of arrests your program described repeatedly?

Was there any attempt by your program to investigate whether the local judge who ordered the release of several hundred protesters from custody owed his or her position to the Democratic Party?

I'm also interested in the complete lack of coverage of protests and protesters at the Demcoratic Convention in Boston this year. I know from reading print news sources that there were indeed such protests, but if I'd relied on your program for my information, I wouldn't have known that.

Finally, aren't you people concerned at all at what happens AFTER November, when the people realize that you have slanted the facts, hidden the truth, and barefacedly lied to them in order to get your man into the White House?

If we can't trust you on this story, what makes you think we'll trust you on anything else?

There was a point during the Reagan administration when the shrill slanting of news coverage against Ronald Reagan caused news viewers to drastically revise their ability to trust the news on a number of things. I seem to remember an opinion poll in which the esteem in which journalists were held actually fell down to the level formerly reserved for used car dealers and politicians.

Tell me you people plan to redeem yourselves at some point in the future. Then please do it.

Real Double Talk on the Rather Biased CBS Evening News
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dan's Rather Biased
Today:
- On the "Inside Story" segment of the CBS Evening News, Bush's adherence to his campaign promises is allegedly being covered.

Today's promise was Bush's promise to "be a uniter, not a divider."

Fair enough, except that the video bites played as documentation of the article almost all came from such famously biased political players as Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and the liberal Brookings Institutions' Thomas Mann. You can guess what they had to say.

Never mind that one-time Klansman and full-time Bush hater Robert Byrd - somehow those stories got missed in the "Inside Story" segment today - has been the archetypical "divider" in the United States Senate all of his miserable career when, as a Dixiecrat, Byrd actually prolonged segregation throughout the 50s and 60s by playing both major parties in the country against each other.

Never mind that Robert Byrd's excessive tenure in the Senate has depended on his party's play-to-win, no matter what attitude - and Byrd's utterances in the Senate have always been shamelessly partisan when required.

Never mind that (to paraphrase Upton Sinclair), Thomas Mann's paycheck depends on his not seeing when George W. Bush plays the "uniter" role - and the President has passed up innumerable chances to shout that John Kerry, the Man Who Would be Emperor, is a lying, cynical, unprincipled turncoat.

The President has declined time and time again to pander to the fear and hatred that sometimes pops up among more extreme conservatives, and he had endless chances to do that, too.

No, the CBS Evening News must blame George W. Bush first, foremost and always, even if Dan Rather has to either lie actively, leave important news stories uncovered, or use his rapidly-expanding and stomach-turning repertoire of dramatic vocal flourishes and facial mugging to say what even CBS News would prefer not to see in black and white (or have to defend in court) on one of their transcripts.
_____

Speaking of Dumb Dan Rather Tricks, I don't know if this just happened at CBS's Denver affiliate (KCNC, Channel 4) or nationwide, but it was funny -
Apparently a second audio channel was mixed in with Dan Rather's mike at the beginning of the CBS Evening News for several minutes, giving us both the sound and the reality of Dan Rather Double-Talking.

I really need to start recording these things.
______

I wasn't feeling well yesterday, so I didn't get to talk about Dan Rather's performance then.

Here's a highlight - Dan Rather called pro-choice, middle-of-the-road Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani "'quote' moderates."

Fair enough, I guess, considering Dan Rather is a "'quote' objective journalist" and has been since he first became a leftist flack in Vietnam.