It seems that Senator Aqua Buddha -- tm/The Blog, so don't steal it, pal. -- has been shitcanned by the ghost of Sun Myung Moon just in time to get hired by the ghost of Andrew Breitbart. This is a remarkably straight career path into the manure bin for the formerly rising young champion of the brogressive Left, especially those who don't want to be droned before they score with that cute barista. (Guess what? The champion of human freedom voted against ENDA yesterday because liberty!) I'm sure AB has something pithy to say on the subject that somebody said first, but it strikes us that he's probably going to show up on Morning Joe, where his kind of journalism is a ticket to the big table.
And then there's 60 Minutes.
Oy. Also, vey.
I held off for a while on this because history tells us that jumping ugly early can have very unfortunate results on stories like this but, Jesus H. Christ on tour with Iron Maiden, does it look like the show screwed the pooch on its big scoop regardingBenghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! Lara Logan is tap-dancing as fast as she can, but the fact remains that the guy that they hung their story on is turning out to be the Stephen Glass of counter-terrorism.
O'DONNELL: But why would you stand by this report after Dylan Davies admitted lying to his own employer?
LOGAN: Because he was very upfront about that from the beginning, that was always part of his story. The context of it, when he tells his story, is that his boss is someone he cared about enormously. He cared about his American counterparts in the mission that night, and when his boss told him not to go, he couldn't stay back. So, that was always part of the record for us. And, that part didn't come as any surprise.
What in hell kind of answer is that? About what was this guy "upfront"? It sounds to me here as though Logan is defending her source's demonstrable lie. In what possible "context" could you believe him? This story fell apart in about 48 hours because its primary source was proven to be completely unreliable. And she's still talking about "his boss told him not to go, he couldn't stay back." The guy told his boss -- and, apparently, the FBI -- that he wasn't even there. In any "context," lying to the FBI is a big deal. At the very least, it should sink your credibility. At the very most, it can land you in the clink.
Oh, and not to pile on, CBS, but shutting Dan Rather out of your coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, when Rather happens to be one of the dwindling group of reporters who actually witnessed the murder in broad daylight of a president of the United States, is an act of towering chickenshit. Shame on you twice.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
