September 21, 2007
Hotline After Dark -- By Grabthar's hammer, You Shall Be Avenged!
Dan Rather was on "LKL" last night:
On why he's suing: "Two reasons, two core reasons. In no particular order -- although I do think the most important reason is somebody sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive, with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news." More: "The other is fair dealing. They had a contract with me. They had obligations under the contract and they didn't fulfill the obligations of that contract."
Asked if he thinks the original Guard report was correct: "Yes. And I think most people know by now that it was correct. ... By the way, I think there was a lot more in the president's military record we don't know about. ... We have a wartime president whose own military records are rather mysteriously missing. That's not, you know, that's not at issue in this lawsuit. But it was in the story."
Asked if he's worried: "I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm not worried about anything. But I'm the person who stepped forward and said, OK, I'm ready to go under oath." More: "I'm ready to be deposed. The question is, are they? Because that's the only way you're going to get the truth of what happened at CBS News."
Asked if he would settle for money: "Absolutely not. Not. No. Absolutely not." More: "For me, it's not about the money. It is about this principle of what we're going to do with our democracy. ... If the time comes that there's money as a settlement, a substantial part of that will go to such outfits as ... Reporters and Investigative Editors Association, The Committee To Protect Journalists, because I would like the legacy of this lawsuit to be not that I made tons of money out of it, but that we kept the little flame, the flickering flame of hard-nose investigative reporting alive."
On apologizing for the Guard story on the "Evening News": "I played team. I worked at CBS for 44 years. I believe in the tradition, believed in the mystique, believed in the people. ... In the end, it was left up to me and I read it. I think anybody who's worked in a large corporation and had team leadership, responsibility, understands there's pressures."
On the commission investigating the Guard story: "It was designed to achieve a certain result so that the corporation would be exonerated."
Rather, on what kind of settlement he wants: "If God smiles and we'll be a little lucky, we will be able to make a legacy of the principle that independent journalism is very important in our way of life and our government" (CNN, 9/20).
SAM HE IS
PBS' Suarez sat down with Sam Brownback as part of their candidates '08 series:
On Iraq: "You can be against the war, and you can be against it on a policy basis, but the military, General Petraeus, they're doing everything they're asked to do. But we're not getting a political solution on the ground. So I'm pushing a three-state soft partition, and I think that's where we've really had a failure taking place."
Asked what happens in Iraq in Jan. '09: "I think we remain involved; I think you have to have a long-term U.S. commitment to Iraq. The key is getting our death losses down. We're in Bosnia 15 years after the Dayton Accords and the split there, soft partition. We're in South Korea 60 years after the Korean War. We can be there a long time if we're not losing soldiers."
Asked if Iraq has been a "windshield issue" that has block all other issues on the campaign trail: "It has, although I have to say, on our side of the aisle, immigration has more dominated the windshield, if you will, than even the war, just this really tough, visceral debate we've been having as a nation about immigration policy, about illegal immigration."
On his core issue: "What I want to talk about is rebuilding the family, because I really believe, in my heart and soul, that if we would rebuild and strengthen the family structure in the country, you'd start to really deal with a number of the most difficult problems we're having in the country today, in poverty, education, and in crime, but we've broken the family structure up" ("NewsHour," 9/20).
DON'T WORRY MEDIA, McCAIN STILL LOVES YA
And John McCain was on the "On the Record":
Asked about Gen. Petraeus recommendation to bring 35K troops home: "I trust his judgment. I hope that it's correct. And the whole surge tactic, it's really a tactic more than a strategy, is that we can have the Iraqi military take over more and more of the responsibilities and we can bring more and more of the troops home."
Asked the first few things he'd do as POTUS: "Commitment to prosecute this struggle against radical Islamic extremism in the most effective way and get the best minds in America, a pledge to eliminate wasteful and earmark pork barrel spending, a commitment to reach across the aisle to the Democrats and ask the American people to have them reach across the aisle to me to fix Social Security and Medicare."
Asked if he feels the media is unfair to him: "I would love to feel sorry for myself ... but no" (FNC, 9/20). [EMILY GOODIN]
Posted at 08:51 AM
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