Richard Bennett

Dan Rather has plead guilty to Gross Stupidity in order to avoid a conviction for Extreme Bias in the court of public opinion:

CBS News today apologized for the “60 Minutes” story charging that President Bush had received favorable treatment in the Texas Air National Guard and said its source for the story was Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard lieutenant colonel who has urged Democrats to wage “war” against Republican “dirty tricks.”

“We made a mistake in judgment and for that I am sorry,” anchor Dan Rather said in a statement.

So who do you want cooking your news, the venal or the stupid?

Neither, thank you; I’ll take the blogs.

UPDATE: Burkett’s story about how he got the memos beggars belief, and his former lawyer (and my former college buddy) David Van Os says he’s suing CBS for libel and defamation. It’s not quite over yet.

Radical feminists have way too much influence over the Democratic Party. It shows up again in the Rathergate story. Burkett’s phony memos came to Rather from the Kerry campaign through producer Mary Mapes. Here’s her story:

…Mapes’ father sees a political agenda behind his daughter’s work. Don Mapes, 76, was a recent guest on a radio talk show hosted by John Carlson on KVI in Seattle.

He said, “I’m really ashamed of what my daughter has become. She’s a typical liberal. She went into journalism with an ax to grind, and that was to promote radical feminism.”

He confessed to being disappointed in his daughter’s role in the controversy. He said, “When I heard about 60 Minutes, I suspected she would be the producer of the show.”

In an interview with Talon News, Don Mapes said his suspicion was because that he believed, “Dan Rather and she have been working on this ever since Bush was elected.”

They’re in the party, in the media, and in the schools. Evidently, J. Edgar was right.

Buck Staudt spoke to ABC News about the sugar-coating allegations:

“I never pressured anybody about George Bush because I had no reason to,” Staudt told ABC News in his first interview since the documents were made public.

So there you have it, the Rathergate story is both fake and false.

Meanwhile, Bush’s lead in the Gallup Poll is up to 13 points:

Now, in the new poll, the figures show Bush with a 13-point lead over Kerry among likely voters and an 8-point lead among registered voters. Both sets of figures represent significant increases in Bush’s standing in the race since just before the beginning of the Republican convention in late August, when likely voters chose Bush over Kerry by a slight three-point margin (50% to 47%), and registered voters leaned toward Kerry by an even smaller margin of one point (48% to 47%).

Well, Dems, there’s always 2008.

So it turns out the forger of the CBS memos was a guy named Bill Burkett who’s had a longtime grudge against the Bush family; the proof is a leak from CBS and the fact that Burkett has hired a lawyer. It turns out that I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin with his lawyer, David Van Os, where we were classmates in the elite Plan II program that produced such luminaries as Kinky Friedman and Mike (“Godwin’s Law”) Godwin. Here’s his statement on the forgery:

CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Governor Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush’s military personnel files, had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.

Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. His lawyer, David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said “the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?” and that Mr. Burkett “is not the proper object of attention.”

Mr. Van Os called Mr. Burkett “a man of impeccable honesty who would not permit himself to be a party to anything fake, fraudulent or phony.” He also said, in response to questions, and stressing that he was speaking only hypothetically, “If Bill Burkett were to later discover that something he was a party to were fake or phony, as a man of honor who lives by a code of honor of the military, he would not permit the falsity to continue.” But, the lawyer hastened to add, “This is not intended to be any kind of specific statement.”

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush’s military service, Mr. Van Os said: “If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 – which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done” – then, he continued, “what difference would it make?”

David’s statement doesn’t strike me as terribly compelling, since the story is no longer about Bush’s National Guard service, which we all know was less than spectacular, as much as it’s about the measures that Dan Rather and CBS were willing to take to help John Kerry get elected.

David’s running for Supreme Court in Texas this year, and this exposure isn’t going to help him; it’s killed Rather’s ratings already. David, if you see this, drop me a note and let’s talk.

Marcel Matley has backed off the claim that Rather’s memos are authentic:

CBS executives have pointed to Matley as their lead expert on whether the memos are genuine, and included him in a “CBS Evening News” defense of the story Friday. Matley said he spent five to eight hours examining the memos. “I knew I could not prove them authentic just from my expertise,” he said. “I can’t say either way from my expertise, the narrow, narrow little field of my expertise.”

In looking at the photocopies, he said, “I really felt we could not definitively say which font this is.” But, he said, “I didn’t see anything that would definitively tell me these are not authentic.”

Asked about Matley’s comments, CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said: “In the end, the gist is that it’s inconclusive. People are coming down on both sides, which is to be expected when you’re dealing with copies of documents.”

This answers most of our questions for him.

Marcel Matley hasn’t answererd my questions, but he did speak with the LA Times:

…CBS and Rather presented an on-air interview with Marcel B. Matley, a San Francisco document examiner. Rather said Matley had corroborated the four Killian memos.

But in an interview with The Times, the analyst said he had only judged a May 4, 1972, memo ? in which Killian ordered Bush to take his physical ? to be authentic.

So whatever else we know and don’t know about this story, we know that Rather lied.

See RatherBiased.com for a comprehensive fisking of Dan Rathers’ case for the forged documents. Among other things, they cite an attempt to re-create these memos on a real Selectric Composer.

Conclusion: Rather has stepped in it big time.