Finally, news!!

By Aussiegirl

Finally!! We have news!! After the seemingly endless deluge of stories on the tsunami and the tidal wave of money that it produced, we have a mini-deluge of news along with the devastating rains in California.

Like the famous ditty about the ketchup bottle -- "You shake and shake the ketchup bottle, first none'll come, and then a lot'll."

So -- suddenly we got a "lot'll" news.

First and foremost for me -- the Ukrainian Election Commission has formally certified the election of Viktor Yushchenko, clearing the path to his timely inauguration sometime later this month. (That is when and if Yanukovich finally runs out of novel and bizarre reasons to continue his endless appeals.)

The CBS/Dan Rather whitewash (er) memogate report is handed in.

Sandy Berger is finally being investigated by a grand jury for stuffing his socks instead of the Thanksgiving turkey -- with higher than top secret documents.

Let's deal with the Thornburgh CBS memogate report first.

As I predicted when this group was first assigned to "investigate" this incident, very little of substance has actually happened, although that gets buried in another deluge of paper, 250 pages worth.

Although at first blush the report appears to be a severe indictment of the CBS memogate story, it falls short of the two most important conclusions. To wit -- it concludes that "haste" and not political bias led to the story being aired at all, and it fails to find that the documents are actually bogus. Failing those two important conclusions this is little more than a whitewash, with a few women and junior staffers thrown overboard, leaving the two biggest honchos as innocent dupes of the evil machinations of an out of control woman (Mary Mapes) who according to the report: overrode all orders from those on high (Heyward), duped all her superiors, rode roughshod over the entire CBS organization, including Dan Rather, and was singlehandedly the only villian of the piece. How convenient.

But even with that assignment of blame, the report fails to find a political motivation of anti-Bush bias even on Mapes' part, even given her openly partisan and salivating emails to various parties.

How the report could wet a toe in the water of the obvious fraudulence of the documents and their provenance, and fail to jump into the water, is questionable at best. At worst -- it smacks of a deliberate whitewash which allows just enough wriggle room for Rather and Mapes to still attempt to claim with a straight face that the documents have still not been proven to be phony and that their motivations were pure, but their methods were a bit slipshod due to "haste".

But -- why the haste? If this story was so important wouldn't you want to dot all your "i's" and cross all your "t's"? The first step in authenticating any document or artifact for authenticity is to establish a provenance, i.e. a chain of custody and ownership. How could it have happened that documents from the personal files of a long dead commander of the Texas Air National Guard could have turned up in the hands of a rabid Bush hater and also be completely unknown to the dead commander's family?

Alarm bell number one should have gone off right there. It turns out they didn't even ask Burkette where he got the documents in their eagerness to run with the story. When pressed after the fact, he came up with some scenario about a rodeo and some mystery woman worthy of an X-Files plot.

We can go on and on with the familiar recitation of all the parties involved and all the reasons why the documents could not hope to be authentic, but we would simply be rehashing what was already thoroughly examined in the blogosphere right after the story aired.

The fact remains, that this was no simple "mistake" due to undue "haste" and brought on by the inattention of a Dan Rather, harried and exhausted from his tireless hurricane chasing, but a deliberate attempt to swing an election at the very last moment.

If it had not been for the fact that the White House was given these documents, and that they then wisely chose to disclose them to the press, and the fact that almost by accident, the blogosphere began to investigate the possible authenticity or not of these documents, the outcome could have been entirely different.

As it stands, there are lots of clucking tongues out there in the land of the media elites, as they sadly shake their heads in mock disappointment at how far CBS has fallen and how this has damaged the great Rather, but what is not being addressed is this: failing the intervention of the blogosphere this would have stood as a viable story until the election itself, and may very well have changed the outcome.

It's all well and good that that was not the outcome. But we came that close, and that is a very dangerous precedent to set.

To now say to every broadcast outlet that you can again engage in such outrageous politically motivated behavior and expect nothing more than a slap on the public wrist -- is to invite more and more of the same.

All I can say is, the bloggers better keep their keyboards honed, because the MSM are not going away, and after they take their obligatory public spanking, they will be right back to business as usual.