Roberta

The rightwing blogosphere and websites area all agog over National Guardgate starring Dan Rather. Teeming with righteous indignation, they're calling for his head, insisting upon his resignation from CBS over the Killian Memos. This after Rather mea culpa'd on the memos, saying he could no longer vouch for their veracity (No, he hasn't said they're forged, despite what the rest of the media likes to report).

Missed in all of this rightwing swill however, are two very simple facts. First of all, nothing in the Killian memos was actually false information. With the possible exception of the allegation that Bush didn't follow a direct order to get a physical, everything else is cooberated by other undisputed documents. Even the White House believes the content of the memos to be legitimate, as they've shown by their trotting out of Dan Bartlett to make excuses for his boss' behavior during that era.

Second, we seem to be missing some mea culpa from Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, etc over the Swift Boat stories. These cable news organizations put up hour after hour of the Swift Boaters opining on and on about how Kerry didn't earn his medals. On Friday, the US Navy said Kerry earned all of his medals and procedures to award them were followed properly.

Dan Rather is the one journalist who's actually had the integrity and honesty to come forward and say he screwed up. Where's the integrity of Wolf Blitzer and Brit Hume on the Swift Boat story? Where's the front page coverage for Judy Woodruff and Bill O'Reilly on the front page of the Washington Post..pressuring them to resign for airing stories without checking them thoroughly first?

People are asking for the head of the one guy out there right now willing to come forward and try to get to the truth. Sadly, noone seems to care about the hours and hours of untruths aired by the cable "news" shows.