No matter what those celluloid talking heads say, I highly doubt Dan Rather and CBS got “snookered,” as Bill O'Reilly, the biggest blubbering head of all, bloviatingly opined.  I highly doubt they got “had,” as those babbling TV brains like to claim.  Rather, I am persuaded they were at least in some measure in on the whole wretched hoax.  I say it’s more likely than not that Dan Rather and CBS were complicit in airing those forged documents whose sole purpose was to show that George W. Bush received preferential treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard.

That's not to say they authored the memos.  That's not even to say they know who did.  They do know who their source is, however, and whether or not he or she is reliable.  They know, for instance, whether their informant is a Kerry operative.

But that is to say that Dan Rather and CBS likely realized they were gambling when they ran their story on 60 Minutes II.  They likely realized those papers they exhibited as evidence were likely falsified (who could not?), but they just as likely didn’t give a damn.  Discrediting President Bush at the crucial hour was more important.  Discrediting the President trumped journalistic integrity; it trumped reputation and ratings; and most disquieting of all, it trumped the truth.

Who’s discredited now?

After all, Rather and his cohorts at CBS were in search of a bigger kind of truth.  They were in search of a more noble, lofty, Platonic Idea of Truth, which, in their morally relative, relatively immoral philosophical alter-universe, apparently trumps the plain Aristotelian Truth any old day.

In other words, Dan Rather and CBS were only too eager to contaminate the pre-election well with these four dubious, strategically-leaked, drab poison-processor drips -- so eager, in fact, that they gave themselves unprecedented journalistic license, sufficient even unto undoing due diligence.  They, in their enthusiasm, in their greed, rushed to judgment -- and then to put their sloppy segment in the can.  And because the needs of the candidate they sought to serve were infinitely more urgent in their minds than their sense of obligation to create clarity in a cloudy clime, they willfully disregarded their cautionary instincts.

And in airing, they erred.

And now that the Eye has blinked and finds itself staring squarely into another kind of eye, a much angrier kind, it is unbelievably slow to open up.

Dan Rather and CBS are only now, some six days after going to press on September 10, distancing themselves from the controversial documents, even as they swear the story itself is accurate.  Only now is CBS writing its own CYA memos.  In so doing, the anchorman and the network are arbitrarily, and far too long after the fact, dismissing the significance of the very credentials they themselves touted in the first place -- papers purporting to prove the validity of a tale whose truth they now contend no longer requires the support of a carbon-copy buttress (also known as “a lying buttress”).

What self-serving, circular reasoning!  Why should the astute viewer be any more inclined to accept this latest CBS spin as gospel than he was willing to accept those fabricated documents as fact?  Why should he do as Dan wants and credit his underlying thesis as credible, when the only putatively irrefutable corroboration of that thesis the network has to date proffered is clearly neither clearly credible nor irrefutable?  If CBS fudged to advance its anti-Bush agenda, then surely it would fudge to save face.  Its fallback position would inevitably be to stick to its story that even if the memos are fake, the portrait they paint of the young, callow, silver spoon-fed George Walker Bush is undeniably a true-to-life John Singer Sargent original.

But the question remains:  What portrait?  If there is no legitimate, confirmed artist, how then can there be a legitimate, confirmed work of art?

Well, on second thought, I take that back.  What we have here, folks, is a genu-whine work of art, all right -- courtesy of the copiers at Kinko’s.

Besides, even if the narrative on which these sham memoranda are based is true, CBS stupidly fails to comprehend that its broadcasting of them is itself a bigger story, with broader implications for the country as a whole and for this election in particular, than the matter of George Bush's military record some thirty-odd years ago in the National Guard is, has been, or ever will be.

So what if CBS says the substance of their story is true?  How can the network know that?  Because Marian Knox and Ben Barnes say so?  Knox is known to have anti-war leanings and Barnes is often called a criminal.  And anyway, their statements are rank hearsay, and, as such, would never bear up in a court of law -- and, as such, should never be permitted to stand as the last words underpinning a serious news piece.

Furthermore, in the wake of this hurricane, how can the public whose interests CBS is supposed to serve henceforth place any credence in anything the Eye professes to see?  If these documents, which the network vetted as its only tangible, admissible proof of the allegations it leveled against President Bush, are demonstrably false, then CBS has no evidence, period.  After all, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian is twenty years dead.  And his survivors either refute the network’s charges or largely contradict one another.  And the testimony of both Barnes and Knox is nullified by their bias.

Besides, you can’t just buy the truth at your corner copy mart for quarters.  You can’t reproduce it on a Xerox.

Face it, Dan Rather and CBS:  It’s wrong to tell a story.  Those documents were the story.  And without them, you don’t have a story.

Now, instead, you’re the story.

Karen Hathaway Pittman, a freelance writer and poet, is regularly featured on Opinion Editorials, ChronWatch, Men’s News Daily, Renew America, and Bush Country.

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