The Pinup Doll Speaks

Though she would have done better to keep her mouth shut…

Well now, it seems that Katie Couric somehow believes that she has the right to critique Dan Rather and the “Bush National Guard” story over which Rather has sued the network…

“There were things in there that were quite egregious in terms of how it was reported,” she said. “And sloppy work is sloppy work…They did not dot their I’s and cross their T’s when it came to that story…And our job is to get right.”

I’ll admit that there was a time when I bought into the freeper fiction that the story utterly crashed and burned because, though I always believed the charges were true, CBS screwed up by not providing originals of the documents. Well, as former CBS News producer Mary Mapes points out here…

… we had done a straightforward, well-substantiated story. We presented former Texas Lt. Governor Ben Barnes in his first ever interview saying that he had pulled strings to get the future president into the National Guard after a Bush family friend requested help in keeping the kid out of Vietnam.

And we showed for the first time a cache of documents allegedly written by Bush's former commander. The documents supported a mountain of other evidence that young Bush had dodged his duty and not been punished. They did not in any way diverge from the information in the sketchy pieces of the president's official record made available by the White House or the National Guard. In fact, to the few people who had gone to the trouble of examining the Bush record, these papers filled in some of the blanks.

We reported that since these documents were copies, not originals, they could not be fully authenticated, at least not in the legal sense. They could not be subjected to tests to determine the age of the paper or the ink. We did get corroboration on the content and support from a couple of longtime document analysts saying they saw nothing indicating that the memos were not real.

And for Couric to criticize Rather is funny, when you consider this item from Kagro X of The Daily Kos today, as well as other precious moments in reporting from “our little news sweetheart” (from here, where she took a shot at Rather previously, believe it or not).

Just keep pleasing your corporate handlers as your ratings for the prime time news cast continue to sink, dearest. A bright future awaits on QVC selling Princess Diana commemoratives and cubic zirconia costume jewelry.