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."