This is how far you can go if you try to influence a presidential election with made up scandals.
At 92 years old, Dan ‘Kenneth’ Rather returned to the scene of the crime, or rather a CBS morning show, to promote a Netflix documentary that explains how he was able to send a laptop running a copy of Microsoft Word back to the Vietnam War era in order to prove that George W. Bush dodged the draft.
In that spirit, this story is fake but accurate. Maybe. At least to Dan Rather standards.
The disgraced talking head whose ability to read a teleprompter in a monotone echoing that of former roommate Tommy Lee Jones while occasionally wearing a trenchcoat on field assignments convinced gullible old ladies that he was a “newsman” has since become an icon to former Gawker and BuzzFeed jornos who moved on to the Washington Post.
It is understandable that a man whose command over the frequencies of time and space would impress aspiring listicle writers whose command over the medium and ChatGPT prompts such as (“name all the ways that Republicans suck in the style of Thomas Friedman”)
“In the grand theater of American politics, a disconcerting script unfolds, one that casts shadows upon the very essence of democracy. The Republican Party, once a stalwart advocate for conservative principles and democratic norms, now finds itself entangled in a perilous dance with power, sacrificing the sacred tenets of governance at the altar of partisanship.
In the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill, where compromise once reigned supreme, we witness a disturbing trend. The Republican Party, gripped by a fervor of tribalism, has forsaken the noble art of bipartisanship, instead embracing a scorched-earth strategy that threatens the very foundation of our democratic institutions.”
(40 more pages deleted due to space and sanity constraints and no Washington Post subscription.)
When Dan Rather heroically sent that laptop back to the dark ages to get the straight dope on George W. Bush (and then heroically denied he did it for three days before agreeing to resign in order to spend more time whispering sweet nothings to Connie Chung) it changed history. (Or it would have if someone hadn’t noticed that the supposed Killian memo used proportional fonts that were not available at the time.)
And as a true journalist wearing a press pass in his fedora and nothing underneath his trenchcoat (in the spirit of Rather, I am exercising Ratherist levels of commitment to the facts), Kenny showed a generation or two or three what was possible if you try to influence a presidential election with made up scandals.
It didn’t work then, but boy has it worked since.
As an elder statesman of journalism, the best way to perhaps remember Dan Rather (aside from the time-traveling laptop or that R.E.M. song about it) is with what is his most famous line. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been to Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together.” Or was it, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: democracy simply doesn’t work.”
Or maybe it was, “I, for one, welcome our new Islamic overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves!”
Like Dan Rather, who can remember these things?
Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield
The post Remembering Dan Rather’s Time Traveling Microsoft Word Story appeared first on The Washington Standard.
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Author: Tim Brown
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