Dan Rather Still Thinks It Matters That His Bush Story Was True

Hey, remember how Dan Rather slandered President George W. Bush by saying that back in 1968, he got into a "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard thanks to special favors, and then he got away with not showing up for training and physicals and stuff? He basically took a year off from even showing up, and decided on his own that he didn't need to actually fly jets. But then a bunch of rightwing blogs "proved" that the typeface of several documents in the report was UNPOSSIBLE for typewriters in the early '70s, and Rather had to resign (except that some typewriters actually could use those fonts, but that came out later so it doesn't count). It was a huge win for the rightwing blogosphere, and gave Free Republic several minutes of credibility for having proven Dan Rather's entire report fake.

Except, of course, for all the parts that were true, which was pretty much all of it, except possibly for those documents, for which the most that can be said is that because they're photocopies, they can never be verified or disproven conclusively. Regardless of the status of those memos, the rest of the story held up -- at worst, CBS shouldn't have included the memos. This is something that politics nerds will argue about forever, like the question of whether Whittaker Chambers actually found Sacco and Vanzetti in a pumpkin on the grassy knoll.

And then Lara Logan did her seriously not very good report on Benghazi, which actually was built around a hinky source. All of which gave Dan Rather the chance to tell Piers Morgan on Monday,

“With our story, the one that led to our difficulty, no question the story was true. What the complaint...was ‘Okay, your story was true, but where you got to the truth was flawed.’”

Damn straight, Dan. Now, if Kenneth will just explain what the frequency is, we can call this story done.

[ Mediaite / TexasMonthly ]