It's "payback time" for Buchanan!
Dan Rather: The final days
By Pat Buchanan
Pittsburg Tribune
Saturday, September 18, 2004
"I gave them a sword, and they ran it right through me," said Richard Nixon. Thirty years later, Nixon nemesis Dan Rather might say the same of the blunders that are about to bring an inglorious end to his long career.
What -- other than blind bias against George Bush rooted in animus or ideology, or an obduracy bred of arrogance and hubris -- can explain Rather's near-suicidal behavior since his "60 Minutes II" segment aired Sept. 8?
In that piece, Rather revealed four newly discovered memos from the "personal file" of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush's squadron commander in the National Guard. The memos seemed proof that Killian thought Bush a shirker whose defiance of orders was being protected by higher-ups such as Col. "Buck" Stoudt.
Rather thought he had a story that could bring down a president. Instead, he has ravaged the reputation of CBS News and made of himself a cartoon caricature of liberal bias. How could Rather have been so stubborn and blind?
At least two experts consulted by CBS warned against going with the story, saying there were "problems" with the memos. Within hours of the airing of the piece, the Web had exploded with bloggers saying the Times New Roman font and "superscript" letters appeared to have come from a word processor.
By the next night, the story of the forged memos was all over the country. Killian's widow and son declared them fakes. Ben Barnes, who told Rather he used his influence to get Bush into the Guard, was being called a liar by his own daughter.
But smoke alarms at CBS were not working. On Sept. 10, a defiant Rather went on air to denounce his critics as partisans and assert that CBS stood by its story.
Over the weekend, the Dallas Morning News reported that Stoudt had been out of the Guard for 18 months when he was supposed to be pressuring Killian. Rather's hole card, the testimony of Gen. Bobby Hodges, then head of the Guard, that the memos were consistent with what Killian believed, turned out to be a deuce. Hodges claims he was misled by CBS into thinking the memos were handwritten. Shown copies, he dismissed them as computer-generated frauds.
Yet on Monday, Rather, his memos a national joke, his experts and witnesses defecting and recanting, went on air to assert again the memos were authentic and the president must address the Guard issues. "With respect, answer the questions," Rather thundered at Bush. "The longer we go without a denial of such things -- this story is true."
This was ludicrous. Can anyone believe CBS would have clung this long to so patently falsified an attack on John Kerry? Worse, CBS appears to have been complicit in a criminal conspiracy to use forged U.S. government documents to bring down a president. CBS must have suspected it was using counterfeit documents.
CBS has to take Rather off the air for the duration of this campaign if it is to even begin to restore its reputation and credibility. For where President Bush is concerned, Dan Rather has no credibility left.
An investigation must be conducted into who tried to affect an election using forgeries of federal documents. And Rather and CBS executives and producers must testify against the hatchers of this rotten plot or they, too, must stand trial as accomplices.
In a way, this is a tragedy. A flaw in a man's character, magnified by his position of pre-eminence, brings about his downfall and ruin. In Rather's case, it was pride and a blind hatred of the right that led him to commit a journalistic atrocity that will end up killing not the president's re-election, but his own reputation and career.
Pat Buchanan edits The American Conservative magazine. |
