Please Calm Down

It was an inspiring, and politically uplifting, statement when Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson stated "I am the dream and the hope of the slaves." Nonetheless, it was a speech, and only a speech. Dan Rather, an excellent journalist falsely accused of smearing George W. Bush and forced out of his job as anchorman at CBS News, is offering false hype.

Please stop whatever you are doing to listen to (and share) this historic moment. The words of Judge Jackson resonate in defiance of cynicism, they grow from the deep roots of pain and struggle, and they usher forth a vision of hope in a better and more just America. https://t.co/IFMrBxLfFB

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) April 8, 2022

Please stop whatever you are doing to listen to (and share) this historic moment. The words of Judge Jackson resonate in defiance of cynicism, they grow from the deep roots of pain and struggle, and they usher forth a vision of hope in a better and more just America.

They usher forth a vision of hope in a better and more just America. Jackson's words are meant to stir and uplift but can do little more, and are not intended to do more.

While campaigning for President in June of 2008, Senator Barack Obama in rousing political rhetoric proclaimed

Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless...

... this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal...

... this was the moment when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.

Barack Obama was elected and yet

Sea levels along coastlines in the United States will rise about one foot by 2050, with larger increases on the East and Gulf coasts, according to a comprehensive new report by federal climate scientists.

Oceans have already risen about one foot in the last century, as climate change melts glaciers and ice caps around the world. But the pace is accelerating, scientists warn, and the next 30 years will see the same amount of sea level rise as the previous 100.

"It's like history is repeating itself, but in fast-forward," says William Sweet, a sea level rise expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and one of the authors of the new report.

Sea levels along coastlines in the United States will rise about one foot by 2050, with larger increases on the East and Gulf coasts, according to a comprehensive new report by federal climate scientists.

A group of researchers created the Job Quality Index and in late 2019

found when crafting their measurement, there is now a growing number of low-paying jobs relative to employment with above-average pay.

"In 1990, the jobs were pretty much evenly divided" said Daniel Alpert, a founder of Westwood Capital and one of the creators of the index. In the process of running the numbers, he said, "We discovered that 63% of all jobs that were created since 1990 were low-wage, low-hour jobs. That was a pretty stunning statistic."

To be sure, the metric indicated a slight improvement during the Obama years. As of when he had left office, it had declined beyond the point it was even in early 2009. The trend is unmistakable.

It turns out that Barack Obama's message on that day represented nothing more than "a vision of hope" that went down in flames in November, 2016. No doubt he wanted the USA "restored (to) our image as the last, best hope on Earth." However, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as the next President, he would emphasize "American carnage," a major theme of his successful campaign. In the following four years, the President effectively undermined the USA as leader of the Free World, an emphatic rebuke of the words spoken by his predecessor.

Let's cool our jets. The words of Ketanji Brown Jackson did "usher forth a vision of hope in a better and more just America." However, they represented only a vision and hope.  We should recognize them for what they are and for what they're not, lest the dream fall far short of the vision. We've seen that play before.

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Bad. Worse Than Rather. Different Than Rather.


I'm disappointed in Will Bunch (Philadelphia) Daily News reporter and Attytood blogger.  Not because, with characteristic self-effacement, he writes of the butcher job CBS' 60 Minutes did on its Benghazi report

I'm a journalist, not an activist, and I speak only for myself. I will not watch "60 Minutes," nor buy any product that advertises on the show, until a thorough independent investigation is launched. I may be alone on this (in which case it would be the most ineffective boycott in history!) but I hope that either a) others who are activists pick up the torch or b) CBS quickly reverses course, does the right thing and renders this all moot. There is one quality above all others that defines good journalism, and that is utter fearlessness when it comes to going after the truth.

Bunch decries "the reporting process that caused (Lara) Logan and '60 Minutes' to believe the contractor Dylan Davies for a year, when his story was disproved, including by CBS' own journalists and FBI sources, almost immediately."  But he goes on to contend

CBS has shown in the past it knows how to do the right thing -- because it did exactly that in 2004, when it based  a report on then-President Bush's National Guard record upon phony memos. That time, the network allowed an extensive independent investigation and the responsible parties were fired or suffered career consequences. Nine years later, viewers should expect nothing less with this Benghazi hoax that's been perpetrated on the public. Instead, the network's dismissive and half-assed response has been an insult to all of us. So now what?

This would be an unfortunate application of the moral equivalence principle- if the claim actually were true. CBS, though, showed in the Dan Rather/(producer) Mary Mapes story about George W. Bush's National Guard record not that it could do the right thing but that it would act out of sheer cowardice.   In April, 2012 Texas Monthly's Joe Hagan wrote in an extensive piece entitled "Dan Rather Was Right About George W. Bush"

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn't exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents were forgeries - and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the source of them - tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, "I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled."

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began "before I started any outreach" to the press. He added that Bush himself didn't learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn't show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as "old news."

In any case, MacDougald's arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, "It's ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it's really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn't seem as though they would hold up."

Nevertheless, the controversy exploded in the press, catalyzed by a report in the Washington Post that aggregated all the criticism from the blogosphere and laid it at the doorstep of Rather and CBS. Bartlett coordinated with several former Guardsmen, including Killian's son, to follow suit and attack the CBS report.

Rather was forced to respond, giving newspaper interviews defending the report and eventually addressing the controversy directly on the evening news, offering up new interviews and evidence meant to buttress his initial claims (most famously, he interviewed Killian's former secretary, who said the content of the memos was accurate but the memos themselves were fake).

This excerpt is from a well-researched, thorough article- not a quickie blog post- which laboriously traces the episode from the 1988 presidential campaign of GWB's father to Rather's lingering, justified bitterness in 2009 about the dismissal in 2007 of his lawsuit against Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and CBS president Les Moonves.

Writing two-and-a-half years after the 60 Minutes report during the presidential campaign of 2004, Hagan has it right.   As he summarizes it, Bush was charged with having "received preferential treatment to enter the National Guard in 1968 in order to avoid the Vietnam draft and that he had then shirked his duty without repercussion."  Once a Republican attorney declared them to have (Hagan's words) "used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn't exist on typewriters of the early seventies," both the memoranda and the story itself- despite corroborating evidence- were assumed to be bogus.  Oops! That same lawyer admitted four years later that he was wrong, that typewriters of that time did have both the superscript and proportional spacing characterizing the memoranda.

By then, the storyline of  Rather as dupe or Democratic Party operative was firmly entrenched in the mind of the public, including that of Bunch, who is unaware that the network's investigation was inclusive.  (Rather was forced out and Mapes and three other producers fired because they had not confirmed their report.) The media, for any number of reasons, decided not to reconsider the incident.

And Dan Rather, arguably the best television reporter of his time, is still treated by CBS as persona non grata.   He has been read out of CBS' coverage of the 50-year anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination even though, as the UK's Daily Mail recalls

CBS radio went with his report that Kennedy was dead - based not on official confirmation but his phone conversations with men who identified themselves as a doctor and priest at the hospital where Kennedy was taken, and a colleague's conversation with the hospital's chief of staff.

Days later, Rather was among the first people to see film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder and he later described it live on CBS, reading from a spiral notebook what it captured of the president and first lady at the moment of impact.

Promoting its special to air November 16, CBS announced "viewers are in the moment with legendary anchor Walter Cronkite and journalism's iconic reporters: Charles Collingwood, Harry Reasoner, Charles Kuralt and Mike Wallace." They all are dead. CBS wishes Rather were, too.

Given Lara Logan's enthusiastic anti-Islamist agenda, the network might be suspicious why no one was able to confirm in a year that Dylan Davies' story was false, especially because the Washington Post determined it within a few days after the report.  As of now, Logan remains a CBS reporter, probably primarily because there lacks, unlike in the instance of Dan Rather, an organized effort to force the corporation to fire her. Unfortunately, there might be another, perhaps even worse, reason:

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The Tough Guy Act, Again


Where have we heard this sort of thing before?   Ezra Klein writes

A few weeks ago, the Obama administration was firm that they wouldn’t budge on tax rates for income above $250,000 and that they wouldn’t budge on the debt ceiling. They’ve since budged on both. Republicans increasingly think the White House will concede more now, and that if they don’t concede more now they’ll definitely give Republicans a better deal if threatened with debt default. Whether or not that’s true, it pulls Republicans — and Boehner — to the right, as it makes it harder for Boehner to argue for a compromise now.

In his first White House speech after Election Day, President Obama had declared

But as I’ve said before, we can’t just cut our way to prosperity.  If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.  (Applause.)...  I am not going to ask students and seniors and middle-class families to pay down the entire deficit while people like me, making over $250,000, aren’t asked to pay a dime more in taxes.  I'm not going to do that.  (Applause.)

Apparently, the President wasn't so firm on that $250,000 thing (and that is on taxable, not gross, income and in 2009 dollars).  When Obama met with corporate executives a couple of weeks ago and addressed the threat of debt default, he boasted, testosterone ablaze, "I will not play that game."  Evidently, he wasn't quite so firm on that, either.

We don't have to ancient history to find President Obama playing his macho man act before backing down.    At his first press conference in November, President Bluff asserted

If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham want to go after somebody, they should go after me, I’m happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. Ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi, and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received, and to besmirch her reputation is outrageous.

It is outrageous, the President declared, as he protected his gal, challenging his critics to "go after me" instead of her.   How chivalrous.  And how disingenuous.  Dan Rather laid it out (program transcript, here) when he told Rachel Maddow (video, below, from Down With Tyranny!) last Thursday

Well, the most important thing that just happened is that President Obama has once again been backed down and away. Let`s make no mistake.

This is chalk one up for the Republicans. They can hopefully in private smile, even smirk, wink at one another. They have the professional scalp of Susan Rice now hanging on their door. They backed President Obama down and away.

President Obama for whatever reasons -- and I thought Andrea Mitchell laid out, a lot of the potential reasons for it -- chose not to fight it to the end. There will be any number of people, and not all of them Democrats, who say this tells us something about President Obama.  He was not for a friend, a close friend, a long-time supporter, someone who was eminently qualified, Rhodes Scholar, the whole -- public servant. Somebody who made a lot of money on the outside but has dedicated herself to public service.

He indicated in his press conference after the election, he made a tough talk, he didn`t back it up.

The tentative tentative (no typo) deal Klein reported may be only a trial balloon and not form the basis of a deal on the fiscal slope.   More certain, however, is Rather's observation that Barack Obama's decision accepting Rice's withdrawal from consideration suggested "he's not a guy who's going to put up much of a fight, even when he feels strongly about it.  Even when he has a strong emotional and loyalty quotient, won't fight for it."   Republicans believe, Rather observes, "President Obama can be rolled for his wallet and his watch."

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