I’d RATHER not have guessed!

The Rather-gate controversy has suffered its first casualties in the aftermath of the 234 page internal investigation, Report of the Independent Review Panel, into the airing of false documents on the 60 Minutes Wednesday edition. Four heads rolled on Monday, January 10, including the producer Mary Mapes. However, the man responsible for the words that were uttered that night, September 8, 2004, came from Dan Rather, and he was retained.

This story never generated the type of coverage I feel it should have gotten. To think that a respected, national news organization could run a story full of holes and falsified documents about a sitting president, and then get a pass, is incomprehensible. And to this day, Rather refuses to denounce the article and the theory that it supports. He has said that even though the documents may have been faked, the story does have some validity, and should be kept out in dialogue. By the way Dan, if you buy that, I have some really nice ocean front property in Oklahoma that I could sell you.

In the report, the internal investigators came to conclusion that Rather, and the team he worked so closely with, did not run the story because of political bias, but rather “myopic zeal”. Rather maintains, that CBS only ran the story in the name of breaking a story. However, producers and investigative reporters have been working on this story for five years, and in fact, this same topic was mentioned in 2000, during Bush’s first run for the White House. If they had been working on a story that long, with no real leads, why jeopardize the credibility of your news organization by running a story that had not been thoroughly checked 55 days before one of the tightest presidential campaigns in history? What else could it be than politically biased?

This affair means much more than just someone getting their facts wrong, honest mistakes happen. But what has happened here are real crimes; mail fraud, forgery of government and military documents, the libel of a sitting president. And to top it all off, Mapes contacted the Kerry campaign about the materials that they had. Although there surrounds conflicting stories regarding Mapes and her discussions with Josh Howard and a Kerry campaign worker named Chad Clanton, it appears that Mapes wanted the story to be so believable, so damaging to the Bush campaign, that she not only tried(and succeeded) to get it aired on CBS, but for the Kerry campaign to also use her information. Congratulations to the John Kerry and his campaign for being more respectable.

It is about time that the Liberals start to realize there is no truth, and no proof to the story of Bush being awol in his service in the TexasANG. The man served his time and was ready in the event that his air squad, and the type plane that he was flying, was called into duty in Vietnam. He did have time where he worked on a campaign in Alabama, but he reported for duty. The family members of Lt. Colonel Jerry B. Killian had stepped forward denouncing the story immediately, and Major General Bobby Hodges, whom Mapes identified as the “trump card” in the authentication process, also denounced the documents as false.

There were at least ten instances in where discrepancies were noticed from the CBS documents, and other dating back to the same period. They were;
1) Locations of the Signature Block
2) Format of the Killian Signature Block
3) Abbreviation of “Texas Air National Guard”
4) Abbreviation of “Fighter Interceptor Squadron”
5) Abbreviation of “Group”
6) Abbreviation of “Officer Efficiency Report”
7) Abbreviation of “Lieutenant”
8) Proper Term for Evaluation Board
9) Memorandum Addressed to “Sir”
10) The Superscript “th”

I take from all of this an obvious decay in the respected media, and the last clutch for life from those in the media elite.