Only "slightly tainted?"

The headline over the online version of Daily Herald TV critic Ted Cox's farewell to Dan Rather says that he left with his legacy only "slightly tainted."

That's like saying Richard Nixon resignation only "slightly tainted" his presidency.

Rather was essentially fired for presiding over a made-up story about the President of the United States on the eve of an election.

And then Cox has this whopper:

Yet he got caught in a ringer during the 2004 presidential campaign when he hurried a story through on a memo that supposedly showed President Bush had skirted his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. Much of the story was later substantiated, but the memo proved bogus, resulting in a scandal that eventually cost Rather his anchor job.

Sorry, Ted, nothing was later substantiated. The only thing new in the entire CBS story was the "newly found" memos a dead man supposedly had written to file and an exclusive interview with a partisan Democratic politician in Texas. The rest of the story was 100 percent rehash.

Cox is following in the footsteps of other anti-Bush commentators who slip little fibs into stories that mention embarrassing moments for liberals. You see it regularly in stories that mention the Swift Boat Veterans. The stories invariably say their claims were "largely discredited" or "shown to be without merit." That's not true but the journalists believe they can make it true by stating it often enough.

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