Need help with an anti Kathleen Parker LTTE

[T Roosevelt]

She has an editorial today that really pisses me off, and I'm struggling with a response. Limit for the Orlando Sentinel is 250 words:


Avoiding the issue
Kathleen Parker has missed the boat regarding her recent editorial, "Dan, What's the Frequency?" Pundits like her have been after Dan Rather for decades, believing that he is representative of the so-called "liberal media." Her reference to Lucianne Goldberg, one of the most hate-filled bloggers on the net, further distracts from the issue.

In the end the Burkette memos are irrelevant to the Rather story. All evidence supports the fact that Mr Bush did have strings pulled to get him into the TANG, and was AWOL, and did not complete his service as required.

How is this relevant? First, Mr Bush has continuously lied about his service fulfillment, an offense with lesser consequences for which President Clinton was impeached. Second, with what moral right can Mr Bush call National Guard soldiers for service to die, when he himself did not complete an obligation that kept him out of Vietnam, a war that his father voted for as a congressman, and one that he himself supported. And finally, a commander-in-chief should have the character to have fulfilled a military service obligation he agreed to. Our current service members and veterans can expect no less.

On edit - here's a snip from her editorial (requires free subscription, probably available elsewhere):


Dan, what's the frequency?
Published September 22, 2004

In a breathtaking scoop sure to make journalism history, CBS News broke a stunning story Monday that rocked the nation: A source "misled" the network by providing forged documents intended to impugn President George W. Bush and his Air National Guard service.

Oh, no!!!

OK, I'm kidding about the scoop part. And surely CBS is kidding about being "misled."

Indeed, CBS "broke" the story nearly two weeks after it already was more broken than a mother-in-law's heart, as Rather might put it in one of his down-homier moments.

By the time CBS issued a statement confirming that documents Rather presented in a 60 Minutes II segment earlier this month were bogus, the story had been busted wide open by bloggers, then reported, rehashed, regurgitated, rinsed, spun, recycled and hung out to dry by the rest of the media.

As punditress Lucianne Goldberg, Mother Superior of the blogosphere, noted on her news blog (www. lucianne.com): "Blogs: one hour; CBS: 13 days."

Which is to say, Rather and CBS confirmed what every semi-cognizant person on the planet already knew. The network built a story around fake memos, and another once-revered institution of the Fourth Estate cracked under the weight of its own self-righteousness.

The joke was that Rather also wanted to break the story of what amounts to his own malfeasance. So he told Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, in a statement that prompted Earthlings to check their planetary coordinates: "If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story."

more

[T Roosevelt]

1. Help...?