We Are Always to Blame

It's the truth. We screw up a lot. I mean, A LOT. A hick from Texas steals an election. Our mantra "let's just get passed this." It should have been, "throw that bastard in jail!" And the person in charge of that rigged Florida election? She has just won the primary and might get elected to the senate. All we cared was that her make up made her look bad. We screw up a lot.

Perhaps it is my contemplative mood, but how did we ever allow the character assassination of Dan Rather? He had been a whipping boy of conservative press for years, which should have raised red flags from the beginning of "The Scandal". After he retired from The CBS Nightly News, his place on 60 Minutes was curtailed and he was left hanging.

We should all remember the way it went down, right? In October 2004, The CBS Nightly News chose to go with a story based on a document that they had acquired from a source. The document was a memo from George W. Bush's superior office in the Air National Guard telling of preferential treatment that George was receiving. This document was backed up by several sources, and after sitting on it for a couple of days, they headlined with it, causing a major firestorm. Over the next couple of days, Republicans sought many different means of discrediting it. What they settled on were two things that both seem incredibly sketchy: 1) they somehow discovered that the document was forged and 2) they pressured the sources to back away from the story. CBS tried to get their sources to defend them, but they refused and went into hiding. I always assumed that this was a Karl Rove plant from the very beginning, but the originating source of the document is not the issue: the issue is how WE handled this event.

The truth of the revelation should be even more damaging to the president than the original story. They interviewed the secretary of Bush's superior officer and she stated that even though she didn't type this particular document (that it was a forgery), she typed many just like it with the exact same information. She not only backed up the claim from the original story, but that she had typed several pieces stating this information or similar information. She knew that George had received special treatment.

The second truth is that the media and their sources allowed themselves to be bullied by a political party. The original story had sources. And despite the above revelation by the secretary, these sources remained in hiding. CBS News followed the protocol that all journalists follow, but the Republican Party bullied the sources into submission.

Was this collusion to take down Dan Rather? Perhaps, but this case is more disgusting than that. We watched true journalism get mugged, raped, and murdered before our eyes, without letting out a peep. A titan of the 20^th Century has been disgraced because he did his job and some political hacks can't win without cheating. So where are we? Where is our humanity?