Previously I posted on Dan Rather’s whining about the climate of fear running through today’s newsrooms. Rush Limbaugh also mentioned it yesterday:
"Former CBS News reporter Dan Rather said yesterday that there is a climate of fear," a climate of fear, "running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career. Rather famously tangled with President Nixon and his aides during the Watergate years while Rather was a hard-charging White House correspondent." Now, keep that in mind, because that, folks, is key to understanding why Dan "Blather" is upset. He was reduced to tears. "Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians 'of every persuasion' had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a 'new journalism order.'" What is it about Dan and tears? He's crying a lot more these days.
Rush really let Rather have it when the issue of Katrina’s press coverage came up:
Rather praised the coverage of Hurricane Katrina by the new generation of TV journalists and acknowledged that he would have liked to have reported from the Gulf Coast. 'Covering hurricanes is something I know something about,' he said. 'It's been one of television news' finest moments,'" he said. Yeah, Dan, it's just like Watergate. All of you guys, the Washington Post and everybody told us, look back at Watergate. "That was our finest hour!"
All right, we'll judge you on the basis of your finest hour. That was not your finest hour. Now they think that the way they've covered this hurricane is their "finest hour." Go look at all the doom and gloom they predicted. Go look at all the body count totals that they predicted. Go look at all the utter devastation they promised. Go look at all of it. Look at the criticism of the federal government. Look at George W. Bush, and then ask yourself to compare what they said with what the current reality is and you'll find there isn't much in common. Of course, do we have to even mention the forged documents? Those big, nasty conglomerates don't like having to defend forged documents, fake news stories and outright lies, but here's the difference. Here's the difference and this is just confirming something that I have warned you people about, I have told you about for years now. He is simply upset because there is more competition than ever before. There is more television stations; there's more radio shows, and he's been disgraced. See, he got a away with this in the past. He got away with what he didn't get away with in the forged documents. He unleashed all that stuff against Nixon and he got away with it then because it's not that his bosses stood behind him; it's that there was nobody around to challenge what the mainstream press was doing then, nobody with a very loud voice. So they had their monopoly in those days and they were able to do and get away with whatever they wanted to do. There was no other viewpoint. Now they don't get away with it. There's a magnifying glass on what these people do.
Of course we can’t criticize the MSM without pointing out their elitist attitudes:
This holier-than-thou attitude these people have always possessed that without them we would not exist, without them the Constitution would have fallen, the country would have fallen, and as we all know it's just the exact opposite. It's without our soldiers we would have fallen. The same soldiers that people like Rather and the rest of the mainstream press seek to criticize and impugn on a regular basis when they are deployed by a Republican president. It's a classic example. I think Rather is beginning to remind me a little bit of Clinton. The same denial of reality, always focused on himself, incapable of being honest. It's narcissism. I was out in LA not long ago, had dinner with a bunch of people, and the subject of Bill Clinton came up in an unrelated way, and I finally asked one of these Hollywood guys, I said, "Would you explain something to me? Would you explain to me why it is that all of these Hollywood hotshots and heavyweights are so in love with this hick from Arkansas, President Bill Clinton?"
He said, "You know, people ask me that all the time, and they make the mistake assuming it's all because they're liberal." He said, "That's a part of it, but that's not what it is. Clinton is one of these guys. They're all narcissists. They all think the world revolves around them. They are the only people that count. Everybody, they think, is thinking about them all the time. Clinton is one of these guys. So he welcomed them into the White House club, and, bammo! That's all it takes. Whether he's a liberal or not really doesn't matter. It helps. But they're all a bunch of narcissists."Well, it seems to me the same thing is happening to Dan Rather. He is living in utter denial of what happened here to end his career, and in the process he can't be honest about it. Now he has to run around and criticize everybody else for the mistakes that happened on his watch, and is that not typical and exactly what Bill Clinton is doing to this day? Blaming everybody else for things that happened on his watch. Is that not what the liberal Democrats are doing themselves as a party? Are they not running around blaming everybody else for the problems they have caused themselves? It is pure narcissism; it is denial, and it is a lack of ability to be honest, and it's overcome the entire mainstream media. Well, "the entire," a great percentage of it, and Rather is just bemoaning the loss of his monopolistic power. He's bemoaning the fact that back in the Watergate days he could get away with all this kind of stuff and be called a hero. He can still be called a hero today by the same people who thought he was a hero then, and he can still be honored by the same kind of people who think he's a hero even after he is disgraced. So he's allowed to live in the lie. He's allowed to believe that somebody else did him in, partisan political forces or whatever else he wants to refer to the people who finally turned up the facts about these forged memos and everything else about this story -- and, by the way, it looks to me like CBS, they hung with him as long as they could.
In any other business, something like that happens, they fire you and ask questions later. They did everything they could to hold onto Rather and to protect his reputation in the midst of all this, fired everybody else but him. Everybody else was made to fall on the sword. So you have a classic case here, pure narcissism, utter denial of reality, lack of honesty. It seems like the whole period of the Clinton era has infected the entire American left, and I told you this for the longest time. It's the worst thing that could have happened to them and they think it's the best. They think the best thing that ever happened to them was Bill Clinton. The worst thing that ever happened to them was Bill Clinton and now all of them are trying to be him and relive those glory days. Have you noticed with the left, it's always about reliving the glory days either Vietnam or Watergate or Clinton. When it comes to looking forward, even in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, can't do it, still have to talk about blame, still have to talk about Bush now engaging in ideological experimentation. Well, the fact is we've undergone 60, 70 years of ideological failure on the part of the left and it's time to change course. We've been in the process of this for a number of years, and it's not time to go all wobbly and weak-kneed here, folks, the boat still needs to change direction and we're in the process of turning it around. Dan Rather's tears indicate our success. Don't be fooled by anything else.
This is classic Rush. No wonder he is number one.
