Dan Rather as Seen by Mark Morford

Dan Rather Takes A Bullet
While the Right was demonizing the crusty ol' newsman, BushCo got away with murder, again

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, September 29, 2004


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Oh, come on.
I mean, really now. Like anyone worth their even remotely sober intellect didn't have, during that entire, cute little "Memogate" scandal, in their mind's eye a slightly oozing picture of BushCo's master puppeteer and most favoritist overfed pit bull Karl Rove, sitting there all puffed up and wheezing and hunched over his grease-stained nail-studded Compaq Presario after yet another three-Martini, four-baby-seal-kabob lunch, hammering out those forged memos about Bush's military ineptitude on his swiped copy of MS Word.

Can't you just see it? Hear the heavy breathing? Smell the gin? Could this picture be very far from the truth? Because, verily, if it ain't the truth, it's hovering over it like a giant elephant-shaped radiation cloud.

And who can't clearly see Rove, the ruthless conspirator and "co-president," grinning like a troll on ether, orchestrating the whole memo maneuver and hiring some GOP flunkies to feed the docs to overly gullible CBS News with the full intent of later discrediting them and screaming abut the bogus "liberal media" and hanging sad wonky ol' Dan Rather out to dry and making a big fat nonsensical media field day of it?

Voilá, the net effect: a total and shockingly efficient deflection of all public attention away from the obvious fact that George W. Bush is, and was, and forever will be an incompetent AWOL serviceman whose meager and embarrassing record pales in comparison to Kerry's outstanding heroism, and adding yet another notch to the Repubs belt of truly outstanding, world-class deceptions.

Conjecture? Mere wishful liberal thinking? Hardly. With Rove, it's never a difficult leap from the seemingly impossible and utterly ruthless to the absolutely soulless and eminently doable.


Look. From doctoring the Florida voter rolls to rigging the Supreme Court to manufacturing the Swift Boat Veterans for Utter B.S. to creating an entirely discredited "flip flop" claim against Kerry to forcing the Democratic presidential candidate to actually defend his stunning Vietnam heroism when not a single member of Bush's team of sneering flying monkeys could be bothered to serve in the military, ever, the proof is frightening and obvious: Rove's GOP spin machine, it is brutal and toxic and alarming.

And this machine, it is beyond more than capable of orchestrating just such a tiny, vicious feat as this pointless "Memogate" nonscandal, given how Karl Rove is the demon god at calculation and redirection and removing all accountability from his candidate and making it appear as though some big media conspiracy is treating Dubya unfairly, even as Rove manipulates that very same media to smear the living hell out of bona fide war heroes, all while shrugging off more than 1,000 dead U.S. soldiers and ignoring the brutal fact that his boy Bush has almost singlehandedly made America the most disrespected and openly loathed major power on the planet.

Do we really not see? Is much of the nation really this gullible and lost and easily misled? Do you already know the answer?

Let's be clear: CBS embarrassed itself silly by claiming those documents are legit. To be sure, their fact-checking abilities are rather appalling and clumsy and not even as good as those of an average major daily American newspaper. And, absolutely, Dan Rather's personality and history of news reportage are, uh, unconventional and more than a little weird, and Rather himself may even be, as Slate suggests, "totally bonkers."

And, furthermore, it may very well be true, as screeching media pundits so desperately want you to believe, that "Memogate" will be some sort of tipping point for major TV-news media, the final straw that broke their aching back of strained credibility, thus creating a huge hole for eager-beaver bloggers and false pundits and wanna-be authorities to rush in and make up the news for themselves without much thought to integrity whatsoever. What fun that will be.

But aren't you noticing something? Something missing? Something huge and obvious and slimy and elephant size and yet somehow utterly ignored during the entire Dan Rather fiasco? Of course you don't -- after all, you're not supposed to. This was the whole point.

It's this: Paperwork or no paperwork, the allegations against Dubya are entirely true. It is common knowledge. Dubya was a family embarrassment. A none-too-bright problem child. A mediocre student and AWOL National Guardsman whose whereabouts can't be accounted for during large chunks of his "service," unless you happened to look in the bars down in Tijuana.

He skipped out on Vietnam due to Daddy's connections and was spoon-fed and coddled, and he binge drank his way through most of his adult life, and no matter how much the GOP fluffs up his threadbare "record," even they can't deny that Bush looks like a spoiled little Texas brat who could no more wear a military uniform with dignity and pride than a drag queen can wear a khaki pantsuit from the Gap.

Funny how that little point got lost. Because, oh right, that crusty and peculiar 73-year-old CBS newscaster, he's the real devil here. And forget Bush's stunning record of flip-flops and lies. It's Kerry who can't make up his mind. And forget all those dead U.S. soldiers who've lost their lives for no justifiable reason whatsoever -- it's, uh, Cat Stevens who's the real threat. Nice.

Clearly, Rove has sold his soul to the devil. After all, his results are brilliant and troubling. You know your cold-blooded re-election campaign is a crushing success when American support for BushCo's handling of this hideous war is actually on the rise, while simultaneously every report, and every military general and think tank and former ally, claims the situation in Iraq is more brutal and desperate and irreconcilable than ever, and that Bush has botched nearly every single piece of war policy imaginable. This is how you know.

And do you hear that? That cackling, hissing laughter? It's coming from the brilliantly orchestrated Repubs, all giddy like greased pigs at how they can so effortlessly switch the attack to some cranky CBS newscaster and let some small-minded neoconservative millionaire attack-dog bloggers get his screeching 15 minutes of fame, as meanwhile, once again, Bush gets off scot-free, the entire point lost, his absolutely miserable weak little character and embarrassing military career instantly forgotten, again. Applause, Karl. You've done it again.

But let us not give up quite so easily. Let us not discount the massive wave of unprecedented unrest in this nation, a dissonant and mutinous anger not seen since Vietnam, emerging like a flame from the sense that we are being -- and have been -- regularly, massively duped, and lied to, and misled, and brutalized, and this shall not stand.

After all, the way to defeat any screaming demon of Rove is simply to stop. Stop running and stop thinking he has all the angles, and turn and face the snarling pasty-faced demon, and rally your legion of thinking voters and scream your truth and hold your ground, and then watch the big monster phantasm of God and war and blood dissolve into a sticky miasma of screeching reeking gases and bloody hunks of polemical mud, signifying nothing. Are you ready?


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