Pass The Gas: Iraq WMDs & Dan Rather

101 Pass The Gas: Of Iraq and Dan Rather

I.

Fan-TASTIC! Senator Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania has discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Oh, wait. He was wrong.

Who says? Two pretty good sources. Source one: Focks News, the fair and balanced folk didn’t swallow the party line. Breaking from it’s Aussie Knee Jerk Conservatism (which is not to be confused with “Tough Love Conservatism,” or – heaven forbid – “Compassionate Conservatism,”) Focks debunked Senator Kendoll’s gushing announcement.

This was quickly followed by the Department of Defense, which politely told the Senator that the stuff he’s talking about is old stuff, not very effective, and added that even if there WAS anything to this, it wouldn’t be much of a threat – hardly enough to go to war about.

Mustard gas. Comes out of the Senator’s um… well, you get the picture.

The talk show hosts can’t well diss this dispatch from Focks, because it’s one of their four most quoted sources. (The other three are Drudge, Newsmax and the Moonies’ fabled “Washington Times.”

So, they accept it, but then tell us that the war is on and we have to stay the course and it doesn’t much matter that the weapons amounted to zilch, because Saddam is a bad guy.

Plus, reason White House insiders, the war keeps the population under control, both here and there. Can’t just gun down the young men in the streets of New York, California or Massachusetts, now can we?

Blue states, mostly.

Fact is, we don’t have a basis in fact to tell what’s fact and what’s fiction. It’s becoming apparent that it’s ALL fiction, that when it comes to Iraq, Katrina, the economy and American politics in general, nothing can be trusted.

II.

Speaking of gas-passing, we’ve seen the last of Dan Rather for awhile, it looks like. America’s Reporter has been unceremoniously dumped from his 44 year perch high atop the former dairy barn that serves as the headquarters of CBS News.

There is an inverse proportion between the ass kissing a network does in it’s “he’s gone” press release and the amount of value the departed represented. So with all the praise in the CBS statement, we can assume Dan was basically worthless, an opinion held in some quarters for all 44 of his years on the job.

Dan, on the other hand, was All-Dan in HIS goodbye statement. They didn’t keep their word, Murrow’s ghost, blah blah blah.

Rather’s a cheap carbon copy of what went on at CBS in its glory days. He’s also the back stabbing SOB who managed to sandbag both Walter Cronkite and Connie Chung. And while his underlings were fired over the bad story about Bush’s war service, Dan continued raking in the kind of bucks that would have made guys like Murrow and Fred Friendly vomit.

Those who’ve heard and seen all these guys first hand and even worked with some of them know Rather was no Murrow.

And even more fortunately, Murrow was no Rather.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2006 WJR