Dan Rather: Some Strange and Mysterious Things

An amazing thing happened last night.

Dan Rather successfully fought back his tendency to break into tears and refrained from another crying outburst. He mustered the fortitude to hold it together long enough to be interviewed by Marvin Kalb on C-SPAN.

From the New York Post:

DAN Rather wants to reopen the investigation into President Bush and the National Guard story that resulted in the Memogate scandal and led to his early departure from the anchor desk.

But his bosses at CBS have forbidden him to go back at it, he said.

"CBS News doesn't want me to do that story," Rather said during an interview that aired on C-SPAN Monday night.

"They wouldn't let me do that story," he said during the shockingly frank interview with former NBC newsman Marvin Kalb.

Rather continues to insist that the story was correct and suggested in the interview that he and the network may have been set up by some outsider.

"There are some strange, and to me, still mysterious things," he said. "Certainly unexplained things that happened about how it got attacked and why, even before the program was over," Rather said.

The report, delivered by Rather last September, was discredited two weeks later after drawing fire, first from politically conservative Web logs and later from mainstream media who reported that the "60 Minutes 2" story was based on forged documents. Rather retired from the "CBS Evening News" last spring. Some, including CBS chief Les Moonves, have suggested that Rather might have stayed on for at least another year had he not been embroiled in the scandal.

"I believed in the story," Rather said. "The facts of the story were correct.

"One supporting pillar of the story, albeit an important one, one supporting pillar was brought into question," he said. "To this day, no one has proven whether it was what it purported to be or not."

The man is crazy. Truly.

If I were someone close to Dan, I would gently, but strongly, advise him to drop this immediately.

Why does he continue to rehash his scandal?

He wants to be vindicated. Unfortunately, nothing can change the fact that he used fraudulent documents in his story. They were fake, as in not real. That's black and white. CBS News preferred to lick its chops rather than verify the documents. That's inexcusable.

However, Americans are very forgiving. If Dan would just acknowledge reality, that the forged documents he based his 60 Minutes II story on gave a big, swollen, black eye to CBS News, he could retain a bit of personal integrity.

I've considered Rather's journalistic integrity to be questionable, at best, for years; but now I'm afraid the man has lost his sense of personal honor or his mind or both. Any way you look at it, it's bad.

Rather's insistence that the National Guard story is true and that CBS was set up by some shady character smacks of psychosis.

It's sad. Rather is becoming the King Lear of the Old Media. I don't like seeing that.

Dan should go away for a while, for a long while. He needs a rest.