Not With a Bang, But With a Whimper

Joe Hagan at the New York Observer updates the soap opera How Will CBS End?:

Last Friday, two of the CBS News staffers who’d been asked to resign over a 60 Minutes Wednesday segment about President Bush’s Air National Guard service finally did so, signing nondisclosure agreements in the process. That seemingly brought the network one step closer to concluding its six-month ordeal—just in time for anchor Dan Rather to retire from the CBS Evening News on March 9.

But the end remains out of sight. Executive producer Josh Howard still refuses to resign. And now Mary Mapes, the producer fired for her involvement in the flawed segment, is preparing to shop a book proposal offering an inside account of what happened at CBS News during the memo scandal.

The book will constitute Ms. Mapes’ defense against charges of journalistic misconduct. According to Wesley Neff, president of the literary and lecture agency that is representing Ms. Mapes, the producer plans to argue for the veracity of the four memos supposedly typed by President Bush’s former National Guard squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, in the early 1970’s. . .

Ms. Mapes’ book proposal will include 40 pages of analysis and documentation that she offered to the panel to back up the documents’ authenticity. In an addendum to that material—supplied on the condition it not be directly quoted—Ms. Mapes avoids direct discussion of fonts and character spacing.

Instead, she argues that the substance of the memos meshes with Mr. Bush’s known records (the panel had claimed the documents clashed) and that inconsistencies in their format could have reflected the work of different typists—as found, she argues, in some of the official records.

The decline and fall of Mary Mapes -- the last to defend forgery -- perfectly parallels the Democrats, as described in Rolling Stone's profile of MoveOn:

[M]any party insiders worry that an Internet insurgency working hand in hand with a former Vermont governor will only succeed in pushing the party so far to the left that it can't compete in the red states. "It's electoral suicide," says Dan Gerstein, a former strategist for Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign. MoveOn committed a series of costly blunders last fall: It failed to remove two entries that compared Bush to Hitler from its online ad contest, and its expensive television spots barely registered in the campaign. One conservative commentator, alluding to MoveOn's breathless promotion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, branded the group the "MooreOn" wing of the party. All of which leaves political veterans wondering: As MoveOn becomes a vital part of the Democratic establishment, will its take-no-prisoners attitude marginalize the party and strengthen the Republican stranglehold on power?

"My view of MoveOn is that they're like muscular adolescents," says Rosenberg. "Their body has grown too quickly -- they're going to make mistakes."

Moveon is guided by a tiny, tightknit group of leaders. There are only ten of them, still deeply committed to the Internet start-up ethos of working out of their homes and apartments in better-dead-than-red bastions such as Berkeley, California, Manhattan and Washington, D.C.

Another out-of-touch Democrat, Dan Rather, will sign-off forever on March 9th. The American Comedy Network imagines Dan's next career. It can't come soon enough for me, or for RatherBiased:



(via Best of the Web and RatherGate)