Dan Rather Needs an Intervention

Someone needs to sit Dan Rather down and bring him back to reality. Perhaps some of his friends can gently point out to him that the entire world believes he tried to deliver a blow to President Bush's re-election campaign in 2004 by passing off faked documents regarding the President's National Guard service as the real thing.

Evidently, Dan still doesn't think he did anything wrong. He has filed a $70 million suit against CBS:

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”

The suit, which seeks $70 million in damages, names as defendants CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News...

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

Unbelievable. He, along with his producer Mary Mapes, still believe the documents were real.

One of the original debunkers, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, weighs in:

I’m going to say this again just to go on the record: the CBS “Killian” memos are frauds. It has been proven beyond all doubt. It is simply impossible that these documents were created on any machine available in the 1970s.

And for Dan Rather to continue insisting they are genuine shows either: 1) a disconnection from reality that borders on the psychotic, or 2) a blatant liar willing to go down in flames rather than admit the truth.

Dan Rather is the mainstream media edition of the 9/11 Truthers. He simply refuses to acknowledge the facts and substitutes his own reality instead.

If the suit does go to trial, it will be fascinating to see Rather humiliated as expert after expert testifies about the documents making him look the fool for believing they were real.