Unbelievable

This blog was born out of Rathergate (see upper lefthand corner). If you check our earliest archives, you'll see it's our main topic.

What I found infuriating at the time was not that CBS had done a Bush-bashing story based on fraudulent documents (or even that the story if true was irrelevant), but that it took them so long to apologize. Any impartial (or partial but intelligent) person could see the evidence and tell it was fake. Yet, today, over a year later, Mary Mapes and Dan Rather still pretend they could have been right--even probably were right.

Now it is true they're surrounded by friends who very much wanted the documents to be real. And that the Thornburgh-Boccardi Report, while essentially showing the fraudulence of the documents, decided (for some political or Jesuitical reason) to stop short of the officially declaring them counterfeit. And that certain supporters, such as The New York Review Of Books, wanted so intensely for the whole thing to work out that they were reduced to insanity.

I'm not going to repeat all the evidence that shows the documents were forged. You can check out the archives at LGF for that. For that matter, let's forget that even if the forgers had done a better job, the rest of the evidence, on balance, still works against Mapes and Rather.

All I want is for someone who knows Rather or Mapes to sit them down and explain if you have a story based on newly discovered military documents, and these documents are in crayon and look like they're written by a four-year-old, your first response shouldn't be "well, the content does seem to fit what we know."