Dan Rather probably needs a team of physicians and all of the King's men to extract his head from his ass. The head honchos at CBS, though, had better be typing up a retraction right now or their "news" broadcast will supplant the fiction writers over at Dateline as the National Enquirer of television. To be fair to the National Enquirer, it does have boast the best(or close to it) circulation in the US. I doubt that CBS has enough viewers to rank that high.

Update: Donald Sensing has the goods on Forgeries, Inc..

Update: Jeff Goldstein risk being sucked into the black hole and interviews Dan Rather's ego.

Update: Mark Steyn weighs in. Excerpt:

Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.

The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.

Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP.

Ooh, that's going to leave a mark.

One final update: Professor Hewitt makes the following observation:

The verdict is already in. Dan Rather, at the twiligiht of a long and less than glorious career and looking for one last big bang, got duped by second-rate forgeries, and took a lot of wannabee Woodwards over the cliff with him.

I lied. Here's one more. Excerpt:

In the court of public opinion, however, the process takes a little longer. For the time being, Rather and CBS News can continue to stonewall by ridiculing their critics as people in "pajamas" and dismissing the mounting evidence that they were duped into using forgeries. It doesn't matter. On the charge of violating the public's trust and refusing to set the record straight, the verdict is already in for Rather and CBS News: guilty.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 01:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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