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September 21, 2007
James Moore On Rathergate
Readers will remember that during the heat of George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, Dan Rather ran a highly controversial piece on 60 Minutes II, questioning the President's milltary service. Criticism surrounding the legitimacy of documents sourced to discredit Bush's National Guard service created an intense backlash against Rather and CBS News from the right wing, and ultimately cost Rather his job as the network's head anchor.
Rather has contended he was scapegoated in the matter, and this week put his money where his mouth is, filing a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer, including $50 million in punitive damages. O.K., this is America, right? While the little guy is increasingly denied access to civil justice in this country (and especially in Texas), rich guys and corporations continue to sue each other willy nilly. Excuse us while we yawn.
We don't have a strong opinion about "Rathergate" or this latest lawsuit. In our view, Rather has always been something of a hot dog, and there were valid questions raised about the legitimacy of the sourcing for the 60 Minutes piece. Whether or not the story was ultimately true, Rather and his producer took some big journalistic risks with it and got burned.
On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that Bush received preferential treatment to get into this "champagne unit" of the Guard, just like a lot of other well-connected young men did at the time. And very serious questions about holes in his Guard service record remain largely unanswered. The Bush team has hardly been forthcoming on the matter, in fact they've obfuscated at every turn. Shocking, no?
James Moore, a longtime Texas reporter who has been on the Bush Guard service story since GWB ran for Governor of Texas in 1994, offered a very interesting take on Rathergate yesterday at the Huffington Post.
Basically, Moore thinks Rather and his producer Mary Mapes took an undue amount of heat for the piece, though he thinks they made a mistake in trusting a source that turned out to be less than unimpeachable. He points out, however, that certain lines of attack from the right (like the whole superscript typewriter matter) turned out to be pretty weak, and that the basic questions about Bush's service have never been answered.
Moore, who co-wrote Bush's Brain, a fairly critical profile of Karl Rove, also notes that the Bush team could lay the matter to rest by releasing all of Bush's Guard service records (rather than the selective releases done so far), just as John McCain did in 2000 when Rove began ciruclating rumors of McCain's mental health problems stemming from his internment as a prisoner of war. We won't hold our breath.
Posted by houtopia at September 21, 2007 11:26 AM