A Clever Prostitute
I don't like Tina Brown. Something about her vaguely reminds me of my ex-sister-in-law ---a grasping, shallow, and ill-informed person too dim to know her own intellectual limitations. Brown evinces all that in her Washington Post column today when she tries to exonerate Dan Rather in this huge journalistic scandal he has started. What else is one to make of this?

For Rather and CBS, all the conflicting tensions that torture journalists and producers day and night came together.

Yep. She's ready to acquit right out of the dock.

The broiling partisan heat,

To which Dan Rather has conspicuously contributed for 40 years!

the pressure to get out of third place with a scoop,

Never mind that what has put CBS News in third place among the Three Dinosaurs is its bald partisan support of the Left, which a few of us are tired of.

the hot breath of cable news,

Before we go any further in this litany of pressures on poor Dan Rather, I guess we should address the fact that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were not duped on their way to pursuing this story. Every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite: that they deliberately, willfully ignored all the warning signs that they were chasing bullshit ---cleft with a well-ground axe and sporting more red flags than a porcupine in a confetti accident. So fuck Tina Brown and the rest of these apologists for even trying to push the line that Rather was just a victim in all of this. He was the very author of this debacle. Period.

the race to beat all the hacks and scribes who keep nibbling away at the story (your story, the story you've spent five years trying to get right),

No, you meretricious slick-monger; this perennial "story" isn't a scoop or anything important at all. In fact, what this Bush-National Guard story is is the embodiment of the Democrats' stupidity and hypocrisy. It is stupid to attack George W. Bush for his service during the Viet Nam era because ---and I know this is hard to grasp, but try--- the man served. He served when Bill Clinton did not. He trained to fly supersonic combat aircraft when Terry McAuliffe did not. He stood ready for several years of his life to provide for this country's defense in the event he were called. Why is all that less important than denigrating the privilege he earned to be released from his duties early to pursue an education? And why do Democrats not see their attack on Bush's National Guard service as hypocritical? They weren't talking about military service when Bill Clinton was running for the Presidency. So what's changed? Nothing but a mistaken sense of opportunity.

the baying of the bloggers,

Yes, it's rather unsettling, I would imagine, for a liberal used to telling lies uncontradicted to be in the crosshairs of an ombudsmen culture of conservative thinkers. But get used to it, luv. It gets better.

the sick sense of always being news-managed by the White House's black arts,

I don't even know what this means. Is this a Rove-as-Mephistopheles allusion?

the longing to show the Web charlatans and cable-heads that rumpled-trenchcoat news is still where the action is,

Oh, what horseshit. No one's had any notion of Dan Rather as a gumshoe-with-a-fedora in decades, lady. Everyone knows the drill: Big Media is a for-profit enterprise. They depend on ---and exploit--- their traditional reach into everyday Americans' lives and living rooms to sell us shit. Some of that shit is information that they got wholesale from partisans inside (and outside) the Government. And, sometimes, "charlatans" short-circuit that propaganda by coming through without the mask of objectivity or the burden of salesmanship, and inform people who want to know the truth. Without Dan's or Peter's or Ted's fucking commentary.

the pounding inner soundtrack that asks: Am I a watchdog or a poodle? A journalist or an entertainer? A tough newsman or a mouse with mousse?

As clear a case of projection as any psychoanalyst could hope for. Topic A: why is Tina Brown such a shill for Big Media? Oh! Because CNBC cuts her a check every couple weeks. Got it.

(Hat tip to the Politburo Diktat.)