The Anchoress

Jim Geraghty over at NRO’s The Corner has done a remarkable job of answering Dan Rather’s call to prove - as though the burden of proof should not be on RATHER, himself - that his fake documents are not accurate.

Geraghty deserves some sort of award for his work. A Golden Union Suit Trap Door Award from the Acadamy of Pajama Blogging Arts and Sciences, or something!

DO NOT spill the secret of how great Bush looks in his TANG uniform, or how fit and RIGHT he looks in the cockpit of his plane!

WE LOVE THOSE PICTURES! We like seeing them - if the press catches on to that fact, they will suppress every snapshot!

And W, in those pictures (as well as in his flight suit on the USS Lincoln) is not a ‘cutie’; he’s a HOTTIE. He’s a righteous STUD-MUFFIN DELUXE. He makes us like him very, very much - even more than we already do. We like him for all the right reasons, but those pictures make us love him for a few wrong ones, too!

George W. Bush in his Air National Guard uniform looks like the boy in college who utterly charmed us, then broke our hearts, and a few months later helped us get over the next guy who broke our hearts by drying our tears and making us laugh.

Do NOT let the left know this. Delete that post! Delete! Delete! Delete! We LOVE W in the flightsuit, whether he is 25 or 55!!!!

I know I am not alone in this. Ladies?

The Dan Rather/ Mrs. Knox interview has made me angrier than I have yet been over this whole CBS-News-Has-Fake-Documents-But-They-Still-Prove-Bush-Sucks fiasco!

Tonight’s interview with Mrs. Knox (who looks darn good for an 86 year old lady) was weak and defensive.

Bottom line - it seems to be ticking the hell out of Rather that W got preferential treatment and didn’t think rules applied to him. So? Bush told us exactly what sort of young man he was - that he was not an admirable young man. That ‘when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’.

If Rather wants to bellyache about preferential treatment, why doesn’t he take umbrage at John DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM Kerry, who - though no longer young and irresponsible - still demands and gets preferential treatment. I’ve read Unfit for Command and the sense I get of Kerry is that he thought himself entitled and was incredibly angry that nothing he could do could keep him off the (formerly very safe) swift boats once they went into heavier duty. He kept whining that it wasn’t the duty he signed up for. He was the only SB officer to ship back home after a shortened tour of duty, after three purple hearts (two of them dubious, none of them serious) and he seems to have gone home with the blessing of his superiors (don’t let the mosquito netting thwack you on the way out) who detested him because all he did was bellyache. What did Kerry do after he came home? He worked as an attache, gold braid on the uniform and all, and went around giving out purple hearts and commendations…nice, elitist duty for a boy who had elitist ideas. And there is nothing wrong with that…

But then when THAT duty was over…Kerry went over to France to meet with the enemy…three times… and fomented unrest and possibly hurt our POW’s with his subsequent (and I believe opportunistic) anti-war adventures (which he seems to have undertaken, btw, while still in the Naval Reserves - perhaps Rather could check it out).

Rather has a problem with BUSH’s entitlement? Sorry. I think it’s a problem with Dan, himself…some long-festering class envy, magnified 100 times over because the object of his envy is a BUSH. This is quite sick and neurotic. No wonder he likes John Kerry. They are both the same sort of person: boys who wanted to travel with a more priviliged, monied and powerful set. You know, the sort Kerry married into. Twice. At least Rather worked his way up there.

Rather says Bush didn’t take a physical…hello? The plane he was trained to fly was being mothballed - it was a flight fitness physical. There is no urgent need to take a flight fitness physical if your bird is ready for the ash heap. Was he absent without permission? Who knows? No one can say either way. More importantly, who cares?

So NEITHER of these men were admirable in 1972, when many of us were not admirable. The question which should be asked of both of them, and it’s a question that trumps all of the others is this one: Is this man, today, the same man he was 35 years ago??? Most Americans, knowing the Bush hagiography will say, NO, he most assuredly is not. Whether they like his Christianity or not, they are convinced it is sincere, and that he is not the man he was. I think most Americans don’t know Kerry well enough to answer that question…but they suspect the answer may be: YES, he is the same spoiled elitist. Bush said goodbye to all that. Perhaps that is why they hate him so.

A writer friend of mine, horrified by Rathergate as he is, is also somewhat piqued at the blogs and the internet. “It’s easy to criticize,” he said, “I don’t see any of them stepping up to the plate to try to do the whole job of finding a story, vetting it, investigating, etc”.

I say give it time. In a small sense, that is already happening - witness the ‘Northern Alliance’ team of Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, Instapundit, Roger Simon, etc…they all have the Kerry ‘after report’ story (briefly linked to by Drudge) that to me reeked of questionable timing and a set up. Rather than immediately posting the sensational ‘documents’ onto their websites and putting it out there, the blogs have said nothing, or next to nothing. I suspect those papers from the ‘Naval Archives’ are being quietly vetted by the bloggers, and should they seem credible, we’ll be hearing of them, again. Taking my cue from those respectable folk, I won’t leak to it right now.

In other words, they are investigating and showing restraint - they are bringing an ethical and responsible practice into blogging. They’re doing it at precisely the moment that the mainstream news organizations seem to be abandoning same. Rich in irony. If the casual ‘pajama-writing’ tenor of blogging (those lowly, dubious dispersers of “news”) began to appeal to the mainstream because the mainstream thought they could now work as “sloppily” as the press believed the bloggers worked…that might explain how Rathergate could happen.

The blogs are criticizing, it’s true. But they are also taking their cues from earlier and better journalists. And some of us do note that Chris Matthews has seemed curiously, unusually more eager to be seen as even-handed since Rathergate broke. He made a point, a few days ago, to give Dick Cheney the benefit of a doubt for the first time in years! Bloggers - lowly bloggers - may end up saving the mainstream news groups from themselves, and elevating the craft of journalism to an honorable place, once again.