Courage for Dan Rather
Mary Mapes
from Huffington Post
Gee, just when I was all excited about Wednesday's big premiere of the new CBS cultural triumph Kid Nation, my old friend Dan Rather went and blew my whole evening out of the water by filing a massive lawsuit against the company.
Here we go again.
It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush's National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.
What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.
To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War -- and then covered it up -- was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.
Actually, we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.
And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.
(Continued here.)
from Huffington Post
Gee, just when I was all excited about Wednesday's big premiere of the new CBS cultural triumph Kid Nation, my old friend Dan Rather went and blew my whole evening out of the water by filing a massive lawsuit against the company.
Here we go again.
It has been three years since we aired our much-maligned story on President Bush's National Guard service and reaped a whirlwind of right-wing outrage and talk radio retaliation. That part of the assault on our story was not unexpected. In September 2004, anyone who had the audacity to even ask impertinent questions about the president was certain to be figuratively kicked in the head by the usual suspects.
What was different in our case was the brand new and bruising power of the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them. They formed a tightly knit community of keyboard assault artists who saw themselves as avenging angels of the right, determined to root out and decimate anything they believed to be disruptive to their worldview.
To them, the fact that the president wimped out on his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War -- and then covered it up -- was no big deal. Our having the temerity to say it on national TV was unforgivable and we had to be destroyed. They organized, with the help of longtime well-connected Republican activists, and began their assault.
Actually, we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.
And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
1 Comments:
Mapes perpetuated a document that was slanderous, libelous and fraudulent. Since Microsft Word was not yet in exsistence in the early 70's any bone-head could see that the document was a forgery. Except if that bone-head is a biased producer and news-anchor it seems. Maybe Mapes was right in her assertion that the "conservative blogosphere decimated" the story. But, what they really did was expose it for the lie it was. So did every other responsible media when the sham was revealed. The issue was the document, not what you think of Bush. I'm sure he did try to avoid being enlisted. So did many other kids (including Clinton). Funny when it's only a big deal to Liberals when it's someone they hate. Knowing how Liberals despise war so much, you'd think they would canonize a draft dodger... oh wait, they already did.
Post a Comment
<< Home