Edward Wasserman, please read County Fair
November 26, 2008 12:25 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
The Miami Herald's Wasserman has a good column about Dan Rather's ongoing detective work regarding Memogate and how his former employer, CBS, stacked the deck when forming its "independent" panel to answer the network's right-wing critics.
Wasserman notes how little coverage Rather's revelations have received:
A panel is convened by one of the country's most powerful news organizations to scrutinize the journalism that produced a scathing portrayal of the dubious military record of a sitting president. And the panel is assembled to the specifications of the president's most zealous supporters. To me, that's remarkable. Even scandalous. Surely newsworthy. Yet The New York Times report from which I drew the above details was the only substantial coverage I found.
Agreed. But just for the record, let's note that CF has been all over the story. Here, here, here and here. And that was all before the NYT came aboard.
Media Matters: The Palin chronicles
The Friday Rush: A series of conflicts
Contrary to media hype, Sarah Palin is very unpopular
In my opinion, of the humblest sort, Paul Lukasiak's extensive documentation of both the relevant (i.e. contemporary) DoD, USAF and USANG guidelines and the documents, shows conclusively that Bush did not meet his obligation.
Believing Paul is difficult. His web pages are amateurish, his writing style hampered by coming up close and personal with the wall of members of the military of the United States actually ginning up lies to serve their partisan agenda.
http://www.GLCQ.com
Comparing the CBS broadcast of the memo as authentic, to the New York Times publication of the "Pentagon papers", and then saying that both reports suffer from the same flaw, in that they are both sourced from photocopies, ignores the obvious fact that the memo was presented anonymously to CBS, but the Pentagon papers were not anonymously presented to the NYT: everybody knows who Daniel Ellsberg is, but who gave the memo to CBS?
It's not the same thing, it's not even close. The Pentagon papers had a verifiable undisputed source, notwithstanding that they were presented to the Times in the form of a photocopy: the memo did not have a verifiable source, and therefore it's being a photocopy does somewhat disqualify it.
I have no idea why people are so misunderstanding of "memogate" and are currently recording it in such a screwed up manner.
Everybody thinks Dan Rather is some kind of media hero, for taking on his former employer CBS. And in the process, everyone is overlooking the fact that a forged memo was given to CBS to report on, for the purpose of distracting from any question about George W. Bush's Alabama Air National Guard service (Alabama, NOT Texas! That's where the bone is truly buried, that was GWB's true Achilles heel in the matter: he appeared to have maybe never even reported to the AL ANG, or if he did, to have never gone back after initially reporting), and IT WORKED! All questions about GWB's AL ANG service were completely eclipsed and knocked off-track, by the resulting "memogate" noise!
And here we are at this late date, with people persisting in the distraction, by talking about everything except GWB's AL ANG service (which he appears to have never done!) Boy, did the distraction work!
You're following Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS, cheering him on like he's a hero: want to really be a hero Dan? Blow the lid off the story of how, why, and who gave you the forged memo (I just said how: anonymously... and I said why: to distract from the truly embarrassing questions about GWB's AL ANG service... if Dan rather was worth his salt as a "journalist", then he'd have some idea of who did this to him and CBS, and tell that tale).
But no, Dan Rather is not going to break the all-important story of how the Bush campaign played the media like a fiddle in 2004, Dan Rather AND CBS included... no, Dan is seeking $70 million from his former employer, as if that serves anybody other than himself... and you're all cheering him on.
And you're all completely and forever distracted from the true question of GWB's non-performance of his AL ANG service.
That, and "Plamegate", I consider just a few of the more brilliant and succesful manipulations of the press by Bush and Co., and it just lives on and on, like everybody's just too dumb to stay focused on the thing they're being distracted from (Joe Wilson's op-ed in the NYT was the thing in the "Plamegate" nonsense).
You end your comment with:
Another perspective might be that provided by viewing the bigger picture.Seeing the forest, despite all those individual trees.
Your accusation that "you're all completely and forever distracted" might just as easily be rewritten this way:
YOU'RE compete and utter obsession with pursuing each and every one of Bush's obvious violations (trees) has blinded you to facts (forest).
Bush's violations, indescretions, buffoonery, however you'd like to characterize them, have cost him, his family, and his political party dearly. And yet you write as though Bush somehow has managed to get off scot-free, fooling all of the people all of the time. It ain't so.
Oh sure, Bush's incompetence has cost many people their very lives, and his cost is lessened by that comparison. And oh sure, I, like so many, will not be fully satisfied by anything short of him and all members of his administration being frog marched from the White House and into prison.
But, in the absence of any formal administraion of justice, WE-THE-PEOPLE have extracted a heavy price from Bush and the Republican Party. We aren't likely to see a resurrection of the Republican Party for generations, and members of that party will forever blame their diminished state on George Bush. Bush's own legacy can never be salvaged. That fact alone steals from Bush something he dearly wanted ... that history would somehow draw a parallel between Bush and Lincoln. It will never come to pass that anyone will mistake one for the other, in anyway.
Bush is now a branded scoundrel. He has been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Done & done. Now, we have a nation and even a planet to rebuild. We have to look forward rather than backward to have any hope of putting a dent in the tasks facing us. YES-WE-CAN.