Would He Ra^ther Be At CNN?
ABC News is reporting that Dan Rather will be stepping down at CBS News. That's interesting, since yesterday, the NY Post's gossip columnist, Cindy Adams, reportedly claimed that Rather will be jumping on board over at CNN for their 8 o'clock news. It's just a rumor, but not an impossible one, given that CNN's new president is the guy who called bloggers a bunch of guys sitting in their living rooms wearing pajamas with no checks and balances, Jonathan Klein. Meanwhile, Dan Rather has been declared one of the Worst of 2004.

He jumped the shark. Then he scared it away.

That's about right.

Update: Or not. The full story is up, Rather will be stepping down from CBS News on the 24th anniversary of his first broadcast, March 9th, 2005. He will stay full time at CBS, as a correspondant for both editions of 60 Minutes.

If you ever get ahold of Rather's election night coverage, it's a good thing to watch drunk.

From comments on the Ivory Coast video:

I guess we'll know it's real when CBS does an expose. Go get 'em Dan Rather!!!!

You got to hand it to the man. His sudden influence on pop culture has sent him out with a bang.

Call In the Bloggers
Glenn Reynolds notes that after 2 months (considerably longer than it took them to verify the memos), despite specifically promising it would take "weeks, not months" CBS News has still not reported results of their investigation into "what went wrong".

Maybe they should get a few bloggers in to sort things out.

We're gonna need to talk to that Rather guy, though.

CNN Doesn't Get It
Just a side note... I was watching CNN this morning, and an analyst was explaining that "some conservative groups" are opposed to Arlen Specter as judiciary chair because "he's a moderate".

Specter is a pro-choice, anti-Second Amendment, anti-tort reform, pro-affirmitive action deconstructionist.

Nobody is complaining that he's a moderate: We're complaining that he's a liberal. Get it straight.

She Loved Too Much
CBS has fired a news producer who was apparently so broken up over the death of Arafat that she thought it was important enough to cut off the end of an episode of CSI for a special report. Viewers, who don't share her vigilant concern for the loss of murderous terrorist dictators, were outraged.

Paging Dr. Orwell II
Remember that creepy feeling you got watching the election coverage live, knowing full well that the numbers showed a clear Bush victory in Ohio? Remember how surreal it was for them to all be saying it was so close, up in the air, a huge, confusing mystery that might not be resolved for days, when the numbers had been conclusive for hours? Were you like me, sitting up all night raging at the sky because you knew deep down that the "impartial" media was taking marching hours from the Democrats to hold up the election?

The New York Times says you were right, even if they do bury it down in the 12th paragraph.

Unforgiving Code of Personal Honor Violated By Ethnic Slur

"I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel." - Senator Zell Miller (D-GA)

Tim Blair notes a reasonably astute and fair-minded piece in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald (something quite unusual for that publication) that ponders heavily on the cultural and ethnic group that predominates in my home of Southern Illinois, and is, in fact, my very own background as well.

When the US is at war, there is a powerful group of Americans, overlooked in American politics most of the time, whose feelings are stirred, whose resolve is stiffened, and whose intensity forces itself to the centre of national political life.

It's a group that constitutes the hardy core of the American folk, and it was introduced by the novelist and ex-Marine James Webb in these terms: "This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture. It is imbued with a unique and unforgiving code of personal honour less ritualised but every bit as powerful as the samurai code."

"This people", wrote Webb to his fellow Americans, "are all around you, even though you probably don't know it". They are the Scots-Irish. They arrived in America in the 18th century in small boats to find existing English settlements, and so pushed on inland to occupy the harsh mountain wilderness along the Appalachians. They fought the Indians, then they fought the British. From the beginning, they formed the core of the American fighting forces.

In his new book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, Webb explains that the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia, who make up only 0.6 per cent of the national population, ranked first, second or third in military casualty rates in every US war of the 20th century.

They reshaped American politics by taking hegemony from the aristocratic English-Americans and starting the populist movement.

Mead describes Jacksonian America as a "community of political feeling" and "in many ways the most important in American politics". Understanding these people, whom he estimates to be 30 to 40 per cent of the US electorate, is central to understanding how America behaves in times of war or crisis.

Now look at what the SMH decided to do with it:


Then foreign liberals wonder why we don't care what they think. This transcends their typical rancid anti-Americanism, and the worthless pommie bastards responsible for it need to feel wrath. Righteously sickened Southerners and Midwesterners should email the bigoted, elitist rag that calls itself a newspaper with some "hate speech" of their own.

Also, convince two new people to vote for Bush today, just as a special "Burn in Hell!" for the SMH.

"Me gun! Me kill! MRRRRR!"
If you liked "Maximum Overdrive", you'll love the Chicago Tribune.

Guns take 5 lives over weekend
2 police cars are smashed in 1 incident

When South Side Johnny went out Friday to visit his girlfriend in Gary for a few days, how could he possibly have known that his handgun would climb out of it's drawer, unlock the cabinet and let all the other guns out so they could go on a rampage together, bumping off innocent bystanders and smashing up squad cars? Worse yet, Johnny probably still has no idea, since by the time he got home Monday, all his guns were back where he left them, dormant, ala "Toy Story".

Seriously, does the Tribune even attempt to hide their bias? How about "Street thugs take 5 lives over weekend"?

Osama bin Guardian
England's Guardian "newspaper", having abandoned their efforts to command the people of Ohio to vote for Kerry, instead pray for the assassination of the President, and wonder aloud (with an unsettling air of hope) if William Shakespeare was actually a member of a secret, mystical Islamic cult.

While we know that the Guardian is about as credible as a supermarket tabloid featuring "evidence" of Michael Jackson molesting the Teenage Werewolf, the Guardian's British readers seem to take it seriously, and that's just frightening.

He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich...
The Guardian, beaten into submission, have recognized Tim Blair as an official Arch-Australian. Appropriate holy garb has been issued:


Attempts to turn the fishhead hat into the Sydney Opera House were unsuccessful.

Welcome to Ohio
The Guardian's correspondance invasion of Clark County is getting responses.

Fuck off and die asshole!!!!!

It more or less continues along that vein.

Let's hop in our Mystery Mobile and find out!
CNN's "On the Road" is heading to Chicago to find out "which way the political wind is blowing in the Windy City".

Gee, I wonder.

Burying the Lede
More bad news from the Associated Press.

Women may neither vote nor run in Saudi Arabia's first nationwide elections, the government announced Monday, dashing hopes of progressive Saudis and easing fears among conservatives that the kingdom is moving too fast on reforms.

Uh, you know, they're having nationwide elections in an absolute monarchy. This isn't nearly as bad, though, as quivering pile of human waste Paul McGeough (previously noted for claiming Allawi executes insurgent prisoners himself) accusing that "only" 21% of Afghanistan's government employees are women. Just a couple years ago, they were being shot in the back of the head for daring to stand in front of government offices. Our middle east policy is an obvious failure! Pfffft.

"Kerry is winning! There are no American tanks in Baghdad!"
Good Lord: Dan Rather will be hosting CBS election night coverage. "Continue reading" for the full text of the press release. It includes a complete roundup of what CBS will be doing for the election, although no word on who will be manning the "Fantasy Land" bureau.
Continue Reading

CBS Suddenly Cares About Not Influencing Election
How nice.

An external review of how CBS News came to use disputed documents in a report on President Bush's military record will probably not be concluded until after the November election so as not to interfere with the presidential race, a top executive said on Tuesday.

Funny, the same ethical issue apparently never came up regarding releasing the forged documents in the first place.

They're "the news" (TM). It's part of the fallout from their job to influence elections, among other things, but it's supposed to happen through cold, hard facts. You know, things that actually happened, like, oh, say, Dan Rather lying to us as part of an ongoing effort to smear the President. No, though, we aren't allowed to find out about that until after the election: It might influence somebody's opinion.

How to Make Up the News
Tim Blair illustrates.

Agents of the French President
The AFP is warning that Al Qaeda has suddenly "hijacked the US concept of a pre-emptive strike".

Funny they should choose that word, "hijacked".


(Via AllahPundit)

So, I was just sitting here in my pajamas....
...waging Holy War of ankle-biting against the Infidel media when...

Brokaw blasted what he called an attempt to "demonize" CBS and Rather on the Internet, where complaints about the report first surfaced. He said the criticism "goes well beyond any factual information."

Really? Can Brokaw cite any example of this, or is this another lame attempt to smear the people who caught Rather red handed?

"What I think is highly inappropriate is what going on across the Internet, a kind of political jihad ... that is quite outrageous," the NBC anchor said at a panel on which all three men spoke.

What's outrageous is running blatant forgeries, being made within hours, then defending them to the death for weeks even as your own sources scream from every available rooftop that you lied, lied, lied about what they actually said.

"I don't think you ever judge a man by only one event in his career," said Jennings, anchor on ABC.

I shudder to say it, but Peter "I have a moral duty to evangelize for liberalism" Jennings is actually right on that one. You don't judge a man by only one event. You do, however, judge a man based on a long pattern of such events, and especially on his reaction when he's finally called on it.

"You know that the role of the patriotic journalist is to put your fear aside, stand up, look them in the eye, ask the rough questions. But you also know that when you do that, you're going to get hammered..." Rather said. "So what happens is you just say ... maybe tomorrow."

What in the hell is Rather talking about? "Rough questions"? If Rather had asked a few rough questions before running the memos he wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

What Arrogant Media?
As predicted, the Old Media smear campaign against the blogosphere is on. In fact, they must really be upset. The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Nick Coleman says bloggers are stupid, calling us "sad loners", comparing us to alien abductees (and, also, to ticks), then predictably whining that we don't have credentials like he does. He also complains that we're just mad because he knows and has done everything in the whole wide world. (By which he means "Minnesota". By contrast, I have never gone anywhere or done anything "as a reporter", and thus all my opinions and observations are apparently invalid.)

All hail Nick, for he is a medium sized credentialed journalist for a medium sized newspaper in a medium sized mid-American city, quite likely even a graduate of a medium sized, moderately reputable journalism school. I'm guessing, though, that he garners considerably less readership than most medium sized blogs. Bloggers don't claim to be "real journalists", after all. It's just that, unlike all too many "real journalists" who are too concerned with bitching about their readers daring to have opinions, we're busy really making an effort not to suck at expressing ours.

If you're looking for outright mockery of Nick, Tim Blair has it.

CBS: Keep Digging
INDC Journal interviews CBS reporters on the other night's craptacular scare-fest, wherein they tried to get everybody all excited about the lie the Democrats are spreading that "the draft is coming back". CBS's position? It doesn't matter if it's fake, or even accurate, as long as people are scared by it!

Schlesinger: "Whether or not there's any reality to there being a draft, is almost besides the point."

Karas: "The truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant to the piece, because all the story said was that people were worried."

Gee, I wonder why people are worried. It couldn't be crappy, misleading news reporting could it, Karas?

What liberal media?
CNN's Dana Bash just got done trying to portray Kerry's "flip-flopper" reputation as being based entirely on the "I voted for it before I voted against it" gaffe.