So the "Bush documents" are clearly forgeries. Now what?

Why doesn't Dan Rather (D-TX) and CBS just admit they were hoodwinked and move on with life? Dig this from Stanley Kurtz at the National Review Online:

If CBS were to admit that the documents were forgeries, it would have no grounds for protecting its sources. In fact, CBS would have a positive obligation to do everything in its power to expose the malefactors behind the forgeries. If the trail led back to the Kerry campaign, president Bush's reelection would be assured. Dan Rather has been at pains to derogate those who are interested in where the documents came from. This sounds suspiciously like Rather is concerned about what a revelation of his sources might mean. Certainly, if Rather personally received the forgeries from a Kerry operative, it would be a disaster for Rather. That alone might seem to be sufficient to explain CBS's refusal to admit its error. (It now appears that CBS News may well have received the documents from a partisan and highly questionable source.)

So, what are we to summise from this posit? That brother Dan and his cronies have been in the tank for John Kerry (D-MA) since the beginning? That would explain all the attention that dishonest hacks like Richard Clarke -- proven to be a liar by the 9/11 Commission Report -- were given on 60 Minutes before their books hit the Barnes & Noble. But this actually begs a bigger point.

What if all that noise about the Mainstream Media (MSM) being an arm of Democratic Party is true? Personally, until now I just thought they were fellow travelers who thought that anyone outside their universe were stupid. If Dan was indeed in the tank for the Dems and was actually doing their dirty work, well a sort of tipping point has been reached.

For the longest time, CBS was the heir to Edward R. Murrow's genius for journalism; a brutally non-subjective stance that allowed the consumers of news to draw their own conclusions and devoid of any partisan spin. The news business in America was not a partisan affair, like in, say, the UK, where a newspaper's political affiliation is well known. News organizations had an obligation, nay, a divine calling to "get the facts" and to get to the bottom of of a story. My first editor Lee Barnes, said, "if your mother says she loves you, check it out".

Alas, that's gone, replaced idealogues whose only interest is the advancement of their agendas. The MSM famous claim of "objectivity" will probably die in the coming years and that's not a bad thing either. This will force Americans to actually think about the source credibility of a story before they actually believe it. The art of critical thinking might actually come back into vogue.

And now that everyone with a computer can create a blog and create their own versions of the truth. So we really don't need Dan and his ilk to be our gatekeepers anymore, filtering out the noise and deciding what's news and what's not. The truth will come cascading through cables at light speed and news-consuming public will separate wheat from chaff.

Which is the way I like it.

So Dan, thanks to your vanity in so shamelessly promoting John F-ing Kerry, you did us all a favor: you showed the world your true face. You also exposed the fact that weblogs can kill a falsehood real-time even if it's shown on 60 Minutes.

Game over.