[Enigma]

This man tried to throw a presidential election with a BS story.

This is among my favorite of the right wing paranoia points of the last several years. Hand in hand with the myth of the "Liberal Media"

Read this last week....

Book 'em, Dan-O: By Eric Alterman I make it a point not to feel sorry for people who make $8 million a year. (This is especially true in Dan Rather's case because he keeps meeting me and then forgetting he's ever met me ...) But you could tell he got screwed by CBS when they dropped him in response to right-wing-driven hysteria, lest anyone look too carefully into George W. Bush's draft-dodging. Remember, not even the Thornburgh commission ever determined whether those documents were fake, though it is a given of virtually all discussion of the matter that this was somehow proven. What the right has always understood is the fact that the one of the most powerful forces in the universe is the fear of the heads of large corporations feeling themselves to be embarrassed. This is nowhere more true than for the heads of large media corporations.
Rather became an embarrassment for CBS and so he was unceremoniously dumped, just as CNN dumped its producers way back when for a story on the use of nerve gas in Vietnam that may or may not have been true but fell within the radar of the right's minions. Thing is, the producers at CBS needed the money that paid for their silence afterward. Rather, because he'd been netting that $8 mil or so -- and by the way, anchor salaries are one big reason all network news is in such trouble today. How many journalists do you think you could hire at, say, $150K per year with the salaries of Messrs. Williams, Gibson, Russert, Schieffer, Stephanopoulos, and Ms. Couric? The number for Katie alone would be about a hundred. (Remember, Peter Jennings left his family $50 million when he died during the years that ABC News was all but decimated.)
Anyway, Dan-O's big bucks come in handy right about now because he couldn't be bought out with a confidentiality agreement.
According to the suit, Rather contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a "biased" and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, "seriously damaged his reputation," and charges that CBS and its executives made him "a scapegoat" in an attempt "to pacify the White House," though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of "pressure from 'the right wing.' " Sounds true to me.
And how telling is this? "Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton's heart surgery."
And this: "Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 -- written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist -- "despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted."

And yet, a few draft dodgers who never went to war for their country get a free pass when tearing down an undisputable war hero and former POW like Mccain, and tarnishing the service of a guy who actually did go to war, in John Kerry. The only reason they never hit Cleeland was because they didnt want to be seen trashing a man who gave up more than his time for his country during Nam.