WorldNetDaily: Dan Rather unrepentant: Story on Bush 'accurate'

You read that right. And though he acknowledges that "one supporting pillar"--specifically, the Killian Memoranda--was "called into question," he still refuses to acknowledge the obvious: that the Killian Memoranda were forged. As he has done at every turn, he still stands by the basic premise: that George W. Bush failed to report where he should have for key assignments, medical examinations, and the like for the Texas Air National Guard.

As Rush Limbaugh asked yesterday: what was Marvin Kalb, who heard this from Dan Rather on C-SPAN, to do--summon the men in the white coats to bring a straitjacket? Will this poor, deluded man go to his grave insisting that George W. Bush was guilty? Is he really that deluded--or does he still think that he can pull a fast one on the American public, including viewers who deserted him in droves?

And what the WorldNetDaily piece does not mention is that Dan Rather openly wept in front of Kalb when he basically said that his bosses hung him out to dry--this although they allowed him to hang on as anchor through the election (which he then, shamelessly, tried to influence on the very day of the election) and still have him on as the chief correspondent on that old rocking horse, Sixty Minutes Wednesday. (Or, as the late L. Ron Hubbard might have called it, "Fifty-nine-and-a-half Minutes Too Late on Wednesday.") If anyone was hung out to dry, it was Mary Mapes, who produced the offending segment. She got what she richly deserved. Dan Rather did not. So for him to shed his crocodile tears on a taxpayer-supported cable television channel is worse than embarrassing--frankly, I am furious.

Space does not permit me to go over all the contrary evidence turned up by Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, or by Scott Johnson (no relation, as far as I know), John Hinderaker, and Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. With one exception: the most damaging witness against Dan Rather and his crew was Charles Johnson's correspondent who actually owns a working IBM Selectric Composer. That was the only piece of stand-alone office equipment from the era that could possibly have produced anything resembling the Killian Memoranda in the form that we all saw. And not only is it a bulky and expensive machine, but its owner also reprorduced the memos with great difficulty, and not by what we would call "default settings" today. And those memos were supposed to include the private jottings of an officer with a conscience, who by all accounts didn't know how to type? Ridiculous doesn't half say it.

I agree with Rush: Dan Rather is just upset that, in sharp contrast to the situation during the Tet Offensive when Walter Cronkite could misrepresent victory as defeat, Dan Rather could not, in 2004, publish crude, amateurish forgeries and expect no one to expose them for what they were. But I go further: Either Dan Rather knew that those documents were forgeries, or he didn't--and if he didn't, then he's as incompetent as he is dishonest, because he made a cub reporter mistake. That a "citizen journalist" like Charles Johnson could make a jackass of a "veteran professional" like Dan Rather ought to be the final indictment of a mainstream press that still thinks it is the be-all and end-all of what is, and what is not, fit to tell the American people. And that Dan Rather refuses to concede defeat shows him to be crazy, mendacious, or both.