Hugh Hewitt - "So the Emperor 'did not manoeuvre at all', as Wellington said himself. 'He just moved forward in the old style.'"
--Christopher Hibbert, quoting Wellington on Napoleon, at Waterloo, in Wellington: A Personal History.
So did Rather and Company just keep marching forward, into a withering cross-fire of (1) bloggers --tonight it is Polipundit, KerrySpot, INDC Journal, A Small Victory, AllahPundit, Rathergate, Annika, Galley Slaves, etc, etc, etc, tomorrow it will be others-- (2)old media that is savaging CBS to save its own rep --Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and (3)talking heads, which tonight included Powerline's Scott Johnson on Special Report, Instapundit on CNN, and John Podhoretz on O'Reilly.
Think trapped in a box canyon with Gattling guns on the ridges all around. Think Cannae. (No, Dan, not the water-into-wine thing.)
What did CBS miscalculate? Everything, including the impact of the blogosphere, and including the change that Florida 2000 brought about. Forgeries intended to influence the outcome of a presidential election, like the attempted suppression of the absentee ballots of the military in Florida by the Gore-Lieberman camp in December 2000, are outrages --outrages widely recognized and detested by Americans of routinely calm demeanor. These voters --casual watchers of politics, not ordinarily focused on the inside baseball stuff-- have had it with Terry McAuliffe, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and now Dan Rather. Maybe some of them weren't sold on Bush, but now they are. Disgust is a powerful thing, and CBS has disgusted the center. It is important that this network be humbled so that no network in the future is tempted to pull a similar stunt.
So bring on the hearings. Next week if possible. The Belmont Club calls it "The End." I think it is the "end of the beginning," but as MSM staggers, we are all well served, including the left. The big guns of the old media weren't very smart and weren't very energetic. They are the descendents --the legatees-- of some very talented folk, but the Rathers and the Jennings squandered their inheritance while striking poses, and everyone knows.
The less pretentious but hard working --like Brit Hume, like RealClearPolitics, like Taranto-- will replace Rather in the blink of an eye. Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet Union --in 1975-- that "[y]es, yes, of course --we all know that you cannot poke a stick through the walls of a concrete tower, but here's something to think about: what if those walls are only a painted backdrop?" CBS has proven to be a painted backdrop. It really is over. |
