Dan Rather SUES!

[FarmallMTA]

Or, as I put it when the situation first started up: finding a counterfeit $100 bill doesn't mean that $100 bills aren't real.

This is a false analogy. Rather did not display the reportorial equivalent of a $100 bill and claim it to be authentic. In this case, he displayed the reportorial equivalent of a FAX of a $101 bill and claimed that IT was authentic. His entire report was based on the information contained within the fax of the $101 bill. The $101 bill fax was his "the smoking gun" validating his story.

This analogy more accurately describes Rather's problem because:

1) none of us on this forum (and almost nobody in the entire world) has ever seen, heard, or personally encountered a military document prepared by Bush's superior officer in the TX Nat Guard during the time in question. Therefore, we were briefly shown a document of a type almost nobody in the casual viewing audience had competence to judge accurate on the basis of familiarity. This alone raises the bar for Rather to either conclusively PROVE the legitimacy of the document or not use it at all.

2) After questions were raised by a viewer who DID have competency to judge the document, Rather was unable to demonstrate how a facsimile of a document prepared in Times Roman #12 could have come from the office of the superior officer at the time in question since EVERY SINGLE OTHER DOCUMENT in existence from the officer and time in question was in completely different font, format, language, and tone. The document presented by Rather is clearly a hoax, and admitted by him to be one.

3) The document was then "verified" by hearsay and innuendo from commentators obviously biased and hostile to Bush, i.e. from those who would have the means, the motive, and, thanks to Rather, the opportunity to make misstatements. Rather did NOT allow us to see the man who made the allegations in the first place so that we could judge his veracity.

The upshot of the episode is that it was a political trick by some individuals opposed to Bush. Rather participated in a critical and essential way and was key to the operation's ultimate success or failure. It failed because his document was a forgery, his commentators lied, and his own willfulness blinded him to the obvious shakiness of the entire premise of the "story."

 

[Rob Lister]

Bumping just to say I think this is very, very funny.

 

[HereticHulk]

And yet another opinion!

The opaque story was partly illuminated by a piece in Salon, written by Mary Jacoby, on Sept. 2, 2004. Offering extensive documentation, including photographs and letters, Linda Allison, who had housed Bush during his missing year, explained that his drunken misbehavior was creating havoc for his father's political aspirations and that the elder Bush asked his old friend Jimmy Allison, a political consultant from Midland, Texas, now living in Alabama, to handle the wastrel son. "The impression I had was that Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston and under Jimmy's wing," Linda Allison told Salon. During the time the younger Bush was under the watchful eye of the Allisons, he never went to a National Guard base or wore a uniform. "Good lord, no. I had no idea that the National Guard was involved in his life in any way," said Allison. She did, however, remember him drinking, urinating on a car, screaming at police and trashing the apartment he had rented.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/27/dan_rather_suit/index1.html

 

[Walrus32]

Surprising as it may seem, there are those who do not regard Salon as a source of unbiased commentary, but rather as a hotbed of strident mendacity.

 

[Darth Rotor]

You DO think that the ANG is the Cub Scouts. Thanks for wasting my time.

For Zig and Joe.

866. ART. 86. ABSENCE WITHOUT LEAVE
Any member of the armed forces who, without authority--
(1) fails to go to his appointed place of duty at the time prescribed;
(2) goes from that place; or
(3) absents himself or remains absent from his unit, organization, or place of duty at which he is required to be at the time prescribed; shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

Article 15 is also commonly used as summary discipline for routine UCMJ's violations like missing a movement locally, or being late to work consistently.

1. Missing a scheduled flight physical can result, tecnhically, in a charge of AWOL (article 86, UA/unauthorized Absence in Navy Speak, or not being at the appointed place of duty) if the scheduling is done in certain forms, or presence at place of duty is on a written order from the person's commander. If you live in Dallas, and your drill in Austin at Bergstrom AFB (back in the day) and you are ordered for your drill to get a flight physical from the Bergstrom clinic, and you don't show up, I'd say an article 86 is a likely write up by your command.

2. Failing to keep one's flight physical current will cost flight status, which is voluntary in any case. How the command deals with that is another matter. (Navy and Air Force have some subtle differences in regs, but the basics are the same.) If the pilot indicates he wishes to remain on flight status, he has to take the physical, and pass it. If the unit commander loses a pilot, who simply won't be bothered to take his annual physical, then the officer's fitness report/OER will likely be annotated regarding a signal lack of motivation. Also, in some cases, a FNAEB (or Air Force equivalent) review board will convene to determine whether or not the pilot is to remain in flying status, or be removed from it.

If W did in fact blow off his flight physical, then he indicated by his actions a preference to disvolunteer from flight status. His manliness check with fellow pilots, particularly back in the day, would put him in the category of "non hacker." His commander would be well within his rights to ground him pending a hearing. If he was subsequently ordered to a scheduled reserve drill, one of which was a flight physical, and he did not show up, more than one article of UCMJ applies should the commander exercise his authority. Now, if said command was influenced by other considerations, like politics, then maybe nothing shows up in the official record.

Unit commander might also decide that said pilot is a non hacker, and ask AFPC to reassign him to a non flying billet so that another pilot, who would bother to stay current, could fill the reserve flying billet.

Zig: I will state this as a pilot for 25 years, USN. If your CO had to tell you to go get your physical, and had to order you to go and get it, you have no business being a pilot in uniform. If you can't be bothered to schedule and go to your physical, and pass it, your lack of initiative are worthy of a nasty mark on your OER/Fitness report, and your motivation suspect among your fellow pilots.

Take that for what it's worth.

DR

 

[Ziggurat]

Zig: I will state this as a pilot for 25 years, USN. If your CO had to tell you to go get your physical, and had to order you to go and get it, you have no business being a pilot in uniform. If you can't be bothered to schedule and go to your physical, and pass it, your lack of initiative are worthy of a nasty mark on your OER/Fitness report, and your motivation suspect among your fellow pilots.

I'm not trying to make the claim that Bush's service is impressive or even above reproach (which no doubt played a role in the fact that his service was never really used as a qualifying credential in his campaign). But all that was known prior to the infamous Dan Rather story. The opinion you express in that last sentence was supportable before it aired. The only new component was the allegation that he was given a direct order to attend the physical. There is no other evidence for that besides the fake memos. With it, we have someone who disobeyed a direct order. Without it, we just have a slacker who didn't live up to the expectations placed upon him.

All of which is a distraction from the fact that the memos were so transparently fake, and Dan Rather and Mary Mape's defense of them so intellectually dishonest, that this lawsuit doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning at trial. Dan's only real hope is that CBS gets sufficiently embarassed over their own failures in that sordid affair that they settle out of court rather than rehash it in public. I hope they don't, though, because it could be fun to watch.

 

[Meadmaker]

Back when this story broke, there were a couple of days when there was some doubt about the authenticity of the memo. Even after the blogosphere had shown pretty clearly that the documents were made by a word processor, there was some period of time that people were saying that they were actually made by a specific brand of typewriter with a similar font.

To my embarrasment, I was one of the people defending that theory. I had a simple reason for doing so. I felt taht the documents in question were unlikely to be forgeries, because they weren't worth forging.

If true, they proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Bush was a slacker who used family influence to get out of service where he might get killed.

Say it ain't so!

The amazing thing to me was that CBS News considered it a big story. That they actually got hoodwinked by a forger on top of it made them look doubly stupid. Now they were reporting something that wasn't newsworthy, based on phony evidence.

Now Dan is saying, what exactly? That it was really not his job to pay attention to such trivialities as whether he was reporting the truth? Maybe that's how the job works, but if so, he was paid an awful lot to just mouth the words put in front of him.

 

[robinson]

Now Dan is saying, what exactly?

In the suit, filed in Manhattan, Rather asked for $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages for CBS' "intentional mishandling" of the aftermath of the story, which effectively ended his 24-year Evening News anchor career in March 2005.

Rather narrated the September 2004 report that questioned aspects of Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War. Using memos that were later discredited, the story alleged that a commander felt pressured to sugarcoat Bush's record. Rather has always maintained that the story might have had shortcomings but was true.

But a review by a panel appointed by CBS found that the story was neither fair nor accurate. As a result, four news staffers left.

Rather charged that CBS violated his contract by reducing his airtime on 60 Minutes after forcing him to step down as anchor of the Evening News. He also claims that the in-house investigation that CBS launched into the story was "biased" and incomplete and that it "seriously damaged his reputation."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2007-09-19-rather_N.htm?csp=34

I guess one could read the actual legal documents that were filed. But what would be the fun in that?

 

[Darth Rotor]

The amazing thing to me was that CBS News considered it a big story. That they actually got hoodwinked by a forger on top of it made them look doubly stupid. Now they were reporting something that wasn't newsworthy, based on phony evidence.
.

Stern magazine, Germany, the Hitler Diaries leap to mind. I remember Howard Stern doing an on air call up, trying to sell them Hitler video tapes. The lady on the other end was not amused.

DR

 

[Meadmaker]

Stern magazine, Germany, the Hitler Diaries leap to mind. I remember Howard Stern doing an on air call up, trying to sell them Hitler video tapes. The lady on the other end was not amused.

DR

I don't think the analogy is very good. The Hitler diaries, if authentic, would have provided insight into an important historical figure.

These memos were stuff we already knew. If they had been authentic, they would have added a tiny bit of knowledge, that there was a specific order that he ignored. While that can be a big deal at the time it occurs, if just doesn't matter 30 years later.

The forger of these memos figured he could get away with it because, even if he didn't have the actual documents, he was basically telling the truth. That's correct. He was. Everyone understood that, and no one cared, nor should they. We don't elect 20 year olds to the Presidency, and the George W. Bush of 1972 wasn't running for President.

This was a total non-story, regardless of whether the memos were forged, or accurate. I think that Dan still didn't get the real problem with his story. He thinks he was fired for not checking his facts. That's not really it. He was fired because people hated him, and people hated him because he had run with this ridiculous story.