New Standards of Journalism
The LA Times is upset with Dan Rather. Not for presenting a one-sided view of George Bush using forged memos he had reason to believe were fraudulent. No, the LA Times is upset that Rather perpetrated the fraud too clumsily and btw, everyone knows "Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard" and "shirked" his duties, so why bother with evidence anyway?

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.

The brouhaha all but managed to place Bush's Vietnam-era service off-limits as a campaign issue, after weeks in which John F. Kerry's impressive record has been under savage attack. Bush gave a smirky speech Tuesday to the National Guard Assn., waxing on about the patriotic sacrifices of the Guard's men and women over the years. All of that is true, but not about him.

And the NY Times proclaims "Memos on Bush are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says". James Toranto opines:

Fake but accurate! If this is the New York Times' new standard of journalism, does it apply to all stories, or only the ones that seek to make President Bush look bad?

So now they are attempting to convince us that it doesn't matter if they memos were faked, because the story behind the memos is true. (And somehow we know that, because we have a few partisan witnesses with very good memories and oh yes, we have those incriminating memos, but never mind that.)

This approach brings to mind the media and liberal spin which gave cover for Clinton to beat perjury and obstruction of justice charges, and circumventing the generally-recognized sexual-harassment rules.

Until it became inconvenient, Conventional Wisdom held that a) It's not the crime, it's the Cover-up and b) consensual or not, sex within a power-relationship is always inappropriate. But the media flakked for Clinton for so long, they convinced America that a) It's not the Cover-up, it's the Crime, and b) "It's just sex".

If only Nixon had been a Democrat -- then Watergate would have just been a break-in.

- posted by The Dutchman @ 4:54:00 PM