the anchorman's lament

A few thoughts on Dan Rather's auto-immolation.

Point the First: Not even the rank and file at CBS believe that the memos are genuine. Sure, my support for that claim might be a little thin (what with the unnamed sources and all), but this is at least highly suggestive.

This CBS New producer went on to explain that the questions 60 Minutes folk were asking were specific enough that people would have been able to fabricate the memorandums to meet the exact specifications the investigative journalists were looking for. “People were asking questions of sources like, 'Have you ever seen or heard of a memo that suspended Bush for failing to appear for a physical?' and 'Have you heard about or know of someone who has any documentation from back in the 1970s that shows there was pressure to get Bush into the National Guard?' It was like they were placing an order for a ready-made product. That is the biggest problem I have with this. It's all too neat and perfect for what we needed. Without these exact pieces of paper, we don't have a story. Dan has as much as admitted that. Everyone knows it. We were at a standstill on this story until these memos showed up.”

The only question now is whether Rather will be going down alone, or if instead he will (or will be allowed to) bring down the house that Murrow built.

Point the Second: As the memos are forgeries—almost self-evidently so—the most obvious question becomes by whom? The unnamed CBS producer of the Spectator piece suggests that they came from the Kerry campaign, albeit indirectly. But even if said campaign has plausible deniability, the blowback is still going to be something fierce.

Which brings us to Point the Third: Just what the hell are the Democrats trying to accomplish with their collective unrelenting obsession with President Bush's ANG service? The tactic didn't work in 2000; failed to make a dent last spring; and is manifestly counterproductive now.

But do keep digging, donkeys: after all, it is so very entertaining when your spokesmouths claim that the President betrayed the country by not serving four months and twelve days in Vietnam. Especially when accusations of deception come from one prominent Democratic senator who never served there, either—but who nonetheless claimed to have spent a year flying air combat missions. After all: nothing bestirs the sheeplike undecided masses like a whiff of 200-proof rank hypocrisy.

Perhaps on November 2 it will finally dawn on the party of Kerry and Harkin that nobody cares about the issue they have so mercilessly flogged. In part, of course, because our guy hasn't spent a career pimping a curiously insubstantial myth of his own heroism.

Point the Fourth: The mask is torn. What this fraud has revealed, beyond all doubt, is that some in the legacy media are no longer content to merely chronicle events: but rather (or Rather) they perceive the opportunity to influence outcomes—of elections, or even of wars—as something to be seized, in the name of Progress. I have written on this before (see Fables of the Deconstruction).

But to see just how deep, and even how depraved, this urge has become, it is worth revisiting this piece from last May (registration required).

The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool, fringed with the usual cast of tattooed defence contractors, I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.

She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.

But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.

Likeminded souls in the legacy media have created a profoundly undemocratic force within our society: almost completely unaccountable, and with influence far beyond their numbers. Those members of that elite who silently assented when Al Gore railed against digital brownshirts ought to take a good long look in the mirror.

UPDATE: The WaPo delivers the coup de grace (registration required).

UPDATE 2: Like toddlers fascinated by a hot stove, indeed.