I just read something truly remarkable: a Washington Post opinion piece so angry, so shrill, so right-wing that it belongs on the blog Little Green Footballs. The cause is the Dan Rather suit against CBS, which alleges that CBS chairman Sumner Redstone has stated that CBS needs to curry favor with the Bush administration. This, of course, scares favor-currying lap dogs like the members of the Washington Post editorial page and this is how they respond. A few paragraph excerpt can't do it justice, but I'll give it a try. The bulk of the piece is a fake letter the columnist pretends was written by Rather himself:
Here, then, the letter -- written by Dan Rather and dated Nov. 31, 2006:
"Dear CBS News:
(snip)
"Let's face it. At times I did or said things that some people, most of them partisan political operatives, considered unbecoming, ridiculous or even 'firing offenses.'
(snip)
"Until I left the network in June 2006, you kept paying me a $6 million salary, even though I wasn't really doing much work.
By popular demand, I'm adding in the smug, fact-free conclusion of the piece:
No sane individual would start a legal battle that could result in his being deposed under oath about his own conduct at the network over 44 rocky years.
Finally, no one in his right mind would keep insisting that those phony documents are real and that the Bush National Guard story is true.
If there's one thing we've learned about Dan Rather, it is that he's a perfectly reasonable guy. Otherwise, CBS News would never have put him in the anchor's chair in the first place. And he sat there for 24 years.
Does this kind of personal assault really belong on the pages of the Washington Post?