Dogging Dan Rather

Dan Rather began his career with a lie. A nobody newsman in Dallas, the assassination of JFK handed Rather his career. He viewed the Zapruder film and backed up the official lies regarding the direction of the head shots. Someone gave Rather his tit for tat career and he's been tatting ever since. Like all MSM, Rather was a talking head. Reporting what he was told to report, from locations he was sent, presenting packaged news by players behind the scenes who controlled his multi-million paycheck. Surely worth it. Who wouldn't speak as they're told for unlimited kudos, awards, glory, travel, pay, prestige? In Rather's own words (on Clinton's honesty) : "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.” (Sounds like pot philosophy.)

Rather was neither liberal nor conservative. Like all MSM puffs, groomed, coifed, exotic backdrops, he presented the angle the media moguls gave him, to sway public opinion for private mogul reasons. He was liberal only in that he sometimes played one on TV. He read the news, as newsmen do. The media has always been an arm of the State, with little significant differences between liberal/conservative reporting. Each first family assigned their fawning reporters and their hounding press. Just enough two party bickering to make you think that all things are fair and balanced. Newsmen who relish and believe what they read of goebbelesque State propaganda is a newer genre, beginning with Fox News. Had we an honest independent media every president since Nixon would have been impeached (possibly excluding Carter). These days there isn't even the pretense of presidential press hounds in the MSM.

But how fitting that Rather's handlers ended his career as they began it; with a lie. Poor Dan, as he read each line he knew the Killian memo was a hoax on him, his time was up, he was drinking the hemlock provided to him. His unchallenged usefulness as a talking head for 40+ years coming to an end. Whoever held Rather's leash must have had a helluva grudge or blackmail. Dan was not to go out in a blaze of journalistic glory as a shrewd veteran newsman might deserve, no truimphant victory of breaking the story of a lifetime, nor even a warm fuzzy quiet farewell....no, Dan with a little of the air let out of him, hanging his head, limped off like a Juarez dog.