You know, I really wish I could get off what must seem like a vendetta against the press in this country. I'm probably going to have to force myself to tackle another issue. However, every darn time I unload my weapon in their general direction..... Damn if one of them doesn't grab the magazine, reload it for me and hand it right back. (perhaps with some training and doggie treats I can get them to also slam it home and jack the slide back to chamber the first round)
Tonight our guest of honor in the ol' crosshairs is Mary Mapes. She used to be just about as high up in the ol' boy network she could get at CBS without banging her head on that (not supposed to be there) glass ceiling. Basically she was numero uno in charge of all the news that the anchor person delivers. The former Dan Rather delivered some of her work to the nation. Of course that's exactly why he's the former anchor man at CBS. The now infamous "Burkett memos" were something that passed through her hands to the accomplice anchor man's hands.
For those who have forgotten a Mr. Bill Burkett (sadly from Texas) "discovered" some lost and forgotten "memos" and other "documents" exiting his printer. These "memos" and "documents" had to do with the Presidents national guard service. They were about as genuine as a three dollar bill with former President Clinton's smiling face on the front. Four document experts reviewed these works. Two departed almost immediately since they were obvious fakes. The other two hung around long enough to tell Miss. Mapes that taking these things public would be a serious mistake because they were obviously fake. (One of the biggest clues was that the manual typewriters of that era did not possess the font used and could not deliver the straight lines and uniform spacing these papers demonstrated. Something about them also being printed on paper not of that era was a tad fishy too.) None the less Miss Mapes and others at CBS had an agenda and something as trivial as the lack of authenticity of their latest tool was not going to deter them.
So the chief stooge in all of this, Dan Rather, faces the cameras and reports that newly discovered documents prove that President Bush had people pulling strings to get him into the Air National Guard and keep him out of the war. Within minutes their "evidence" of this eeeeevil plot had more holes in it than a warehouse of aged Swiss cheese. The blogs lit up like a California hillside during brush fire season with Santa Anna winds fanning the flames.
CBS should have quickly tossed Mr. Burkett under a bus, or passing Metro commuter train but instead they stuck with their story. (and now we all know why the news industry calls them stories, don't we) But they did start to waffle after a couple of days of the growing heat. They started to defend themselves with very carefully selected words. They would say that the information in the memo's had not been proven to be false, thereby cleverly overlooking the fact that the entire document was a gross fabrication. And since a lot of America pays little or no attention and only picks up the sound bites what started to stick was that Bush lied. Geee! That sounds exactly like the same line the democrats are still trying to use today. Talk about your broken record. But as we've learned from the CBS debacle.... If you don't have anything you can use against someone simply make it up.
Miss Mapes seems to have found herself in the company of the also unemployed Mr Rather lately. Well... not actually IN Mr. Rather's company.... just equally unemployed. She appeared on the Larry King show the other night. Funny how liberals will not simply let other disgraced liberals quietly fade from memory. Larry asks about the documents several times and Miss Mapes comes out with something that ought to have everyone in the country taking a vow to never watch mainstream news again. "Larry, it's not our job to prove the source material is authentic.... It's up to the other side to prove it's not."
I sure hope to hell that I wasn't the only one to grasp the significance of that statement. For those not tuned in to LibSpeak what she just said was that it's okay for the media to just make stuff up if it helps advance their "story" and their agenda. Normally they advance their agenda by very selectively reporting the "news" to America. For instance.... their anti-war agenda. Please name the last time you heard a positive news report on either Iraq or Afghanistan. Please recount the last time a major media source aired a report showing our troops engaged in building schools (over 350 at last count), rebuilding municipal infrastructure, protecting and treating the hapless victims of terrorist attacks. Keep your eyes peeled for the paid ads run by the people of Kurdistan in northern Iraq TO the people of America! Kurdistan is quiet, peaceful and not one U.S. troop has died in that area since 2003. They just want to say thank you America for our freedom. That should have been a news item on every major network but it wasn't and it won't be either. That's why the people of Kurdistan had to run ads in the American media... so we would know the truth.
That last line is a sad commentary, folks. For several years now I've been mulling over the idea of assigning a rating system to all the media. We could have a "BS" rating for the tabloids for example. We could have a "N" rating for outlets that accurately reported the news. We might have a rating of "VB" for outlets that demonstrated a high degree of bias in their reporting. One could keep breaking it down but that's enough for now. Then I take the rating system one step further. First to have to prominently display your rating on the main page of a print publication and in the lower right hand corner of a TV presentation. I'd like to go one step farther and just flatly forbid anyone from being on TV unless they had an "N" rating but there is that freedom of the press thing. My nifty little system doesn't restrict the freedom of the press though. All it does is warn the public that you just might be on the receiving end of a big steaming shovel full if you don't see that "N" rating. I think that's something everyone in America ought to know!
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