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Monday, November 17, 2008

He who laughs last...
Posted by Jill | 5:11 AM
Dan Rather isn't laughing yet, but before it's over, he might be.

CBS ought to know that there is absolutely nothing the network news divisions can do to please the Republican Party, short of being blatant right-wing partisans like Fox News. NBC spent eight years standing for Nail Bill Clinton, and despite those eight years, the current stewardship of Press the Meat by obvious Republican flack Tom Brokaw, the endless face time given to Pat Buchanan, the banishment of Ashleigh Banfield once she started to behave like an actual journalist, and the network's endless flacking for the Iraq War until it became obvious that it was a mess, the right wing still wants NBC shut down.

I don't know why the network of Edward R. Murrow and 60 Minutes was so quick to shut down Dan Rather and then stack an "investigative committee" with Republicans; why the suits at CBS thought selling its soul would be sufficient to curry favor with the Republicans, but as we're starting to see now that Dan RAther is getting his day in court, it seems that's exactly what they did:
So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money.

Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.

Among the materials that money has shaken free for Mr. Rather are internal CBS memorandums turned over to his lawyers, showing that network executives used Republican operatives to vet the names of potential members of a panel that had been billed as independent and charged with investigating the “60 Minutes” segment.

Mr. Rather attracted the ire of Republican bloggers and talk radio in particular after the segment, which was broadcast on a weekday edition of “60 Minutes” in September 2004. It purported to have unearthed evidence about favorable treatment extended to President Bush during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The network eventually responded to its critics by saying it could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the documents on which the report had been based. The network also commissioned an investigation led by Dick Thornburgh, a prominent Republican and former United States attorney general, and Louis D. Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, not so much to verify the documents, but to determine how the segment got on the air.

[snip]

Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather’s lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled “Roger Ailes,” the founder of Fox News.

Asked about the assembly of the panel in a sworn deposition, Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News, acknowledged that he had wanted at least one member to sit well with conservatives: “CBS News, fairly or unfairly, had a reputation for liberal bias,” and “the harshest scrutiny was obviously going to come from the right.”


Here we had a network famous for its investigative reporting, admitting in court documents that its primary mission in the Rather case was an attempt to mollify the right -- a bunch of whiny-ass titty babies who scream "liberal bias" every time a Republican receives the slightest criticism. All you have to do is look at how they reacted when Katie Couric, whom I guess they figured would ask Sarah Palin for her moose stew recipe, had the temerity to ask the Wasilla Woolyhead what newspapers and magazines she read.

I can guarantee that sometime after George W. Bush leaves office, someone is going to come forward and verify that the man in the codpiece who masqueraded as a flyboy in declaring "victory" in Iraq five years ago, was, in fact, AWOL from his National Guard service. The documents in question that was used by Rather and Mary Mapes to build their story may have been forgeries (even if forgeries of actual documents), but as Eric Boehlert reported in September 2004, AP went to court at the time to obtain other documents which demonstrate clearly that the substance of the CBS story was true:
[AP'S] lawsuit had already resulted in the disclosure of previously unreleased flight logs that indicated that Bush, a fully trained pilot since 1970, often flew two-seater training jets in March 1972, shortly before he piloted a plane for the last time. This despite his promise, when he entered the Guard's training program, to serve as a full pilot until 1974.

What is also already known is that in the spring of 1972, with 770 days left of required duty, Bush unilaterally decided that he was done fulfilling his military obligation. Also in the spring of 1972, Bush refused to take a physical and quickly cleared out of his Guard base in Houston, heading off to work on the Senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount in Alabama. Referring to that period, one of Bush's Guard flying buddies remarked to USA Today in 2002, "It was an irrational time in his life."

It may have been an irrational time for him, but Bush managed to focus intently on not serving in the Guard in any significant capacity again. His public records paint a portrait of a Guardsman who, with the cooperation of his Texas Air National Guard superiors, simply flouted regulation after regulation (more than 30 by Salon's count) indifferent to his signed obligation to serve.

The details can get a bit obscure, but the basic timeline of Bush's service between 1972 and 1974 is easy to follow: In spring 1972 Bush attempted to permanently transfer to a non-flying Alabama Guard unit. During the second half of 1972 he missed many of his required weekend training drills. At the end of the year he returned to Houston. Bush then had to make up the absences he had stacked up while in Alabama through "substitute service" training in 1972 and 1973. In July 1973, Bush asked to be released by the Texas Air National Guard so he could attend Harvard Business School. In September, the Guard let him go, and the Air Force officially dismissed Bush in November 1974.

Yet looking at the already available public records, they raise as many questions as they answer about Bush and his surrogates' accounts of his service -- because from his Alabama transfer to his missed physical to his substitute service to his "inactive status" to his honorable discharge, it was as if Air Force and Guard regulations simply did not apply to Lt. Bush. He seemed to become a ghostlike figure, doing -- or not doing -- whatever he pleased, unsupervised and unrated by his commanders. One serious question is whether some of Bush's superiors may have played an active role in hiding Bush's shoddy record -- pressured perhaps by powerful politicians -- by crediting him with crucial makeup training days that appear dubious in nature.

So why does this matter now, one might ask? Bush is leaving soon, Barack Obama and the Democrats have been given the mops and slop buckets and hazmat suits they'll need if they're going to try to clean up his mess, and isn't it all water under the bridge?

Hardly.

Remember what the media did when Bill Clinton, another "outsider", dared to move into the White House? Suddenly a 25-year-old land deal in which the Clintons LOST money became a big deal to the maintream media, and they flogged it until it grew into a "Find Something" witch hunt against Clinton (in which he stupidly gave them ammunition). Rush Limbaugh has already put the meme "Obama recession" out into the ozone, regardless of the 3000 points the Dow had dropped before the election. So far the networks haven't picked up that particular football to run with it, but you can bet that if the recession doesn't end one minute after Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, they will. Already they've decided that a president-elect who won by 6 million popular votes and an electoral landslide won a close election, while the current occupant of the White House, who squeaked back in by stealing Ohio with the help of a Republican Secretary of State and a partisan voting machine company CEO, got a "mandate." The prevailing sentiment on the three news networks and the print press is that Barack Obama has an obligation to work closely with John McCain. Where were the calls for George W. Bush to work closely with John Kerry? Or with Al Gore, for that matter? Why is it that when a Democrat wins, he has to mollify Republicans, but when Republicans win, they get to treat everyone who didn't vote for them as traitors?

The right can scream all it wants to about the "liberal media", but its side of the fence has been fellated virtually nonstop (Keith Olbermann notwithstanding) for the last sixteen years over the airwaves and in print. If the Rather case can expose the myth of the "liberal media" once and for all, it will be doing a public service regardless of whether the truth about George W. Bush ever comes out.

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4 Comments:
Blogger Unknown said...
Maybe CBS should just give him 70 million xerox copies of a dollar bill. It's not like he could tell the difference.
11/17/08, 9:19 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Rather can be a rather pompous boob at times, but I sure hope he prevails here. I have always thought that he was really on to something with this shit about bush, but that daddy Bush's long arm was able to prevail and keep it quiet. Pity, we might have been saved the last 8 years of misery.
11/17/08, 3:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Give 'em hell, Dan. Don't give up.
11/17/08, 10:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Go Dan. Time to drag this pile of steaming lies into the daylight.
11/18/08, 1:50 PM  
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