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Still Bitter: Dan Rather Takes Incredibly Cheap Shot at Bush Funeral Speakers

By Kara Pendleton December 6, 2018 at 2:10pm

It wasn’t just CNN using late former president George H.W. Bush’s funeral to take swipes at someone — in their case, President Donald Trump.

Disgraced former news anchor Dan Rather also hopped on the bashing bandwagon, but his targeting was a little different.

Rather zeroed in on the funeral speakers in order to exact his revenge. Revenge for something of his own doing, too.

Watching today’s eulogies I thought about our national reckoning. We can’t rely on the consciences of those who have shown none or humility from those who refuse introspection. Forces of change must swell in the population at large to shake our republic into a more just future.

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) December 6, 2018

While he certainly had an audience lapping up his vitriol, he did not get away with it, entirely. The National Review’s Senior Editor Jonah Goldberg called him out on it.

Please note that foul language is used in Goldberg’s tweeted response.

You were literally the single most dishonest, unethical, and career obsessed asshole to the Bushes in the last 40 years. Sit out a play jackwad. https://t.co/XGqbGlI0g0

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) December 6, 2018

Was it wrong for Dan Rather to tweet what he did about the funeral speakers?

In 2015, People magazine reported that a decade later, Rather still defended the “fake news” that resulted in him being removed from the CBS anchor desk.

Rather had reported that President George W. Bush “went AWOL during his time in the Texas Air National Guard.” The Bush administration fought back, claiming that documents used “as the basis” for the story “were inauthentic.”

An independent investigation deemed Rather’s reporting to have ignored “fundamental journalistic principles.” Later Rather sued CBS for $70 million, but “the claim was eventually dismissed.”

Also in 2015, Rather told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that, “We reported a true story. We didn’t do it perfectly.”

“We made some mistakes of getting to the truth. But that didn’t change the truth of what we reported.”

He also blasted both the Bush administration and CBS for the ultimate outcome. “In the process of putting this together, those partisan political forces and ideological forces who found this a very inconvenient story — they couldn’t attack the hard-rock facts, so they looked, ‘Where is the story weak?’ So they concentrated on the documents and they succeeded.”

“They overwhelmed CBS — they overwhelmed us who reported it — by making the focus not on the hard-rock truth of the story, but rather the process by which we arrived at that truth. They changed the conversation. The corporate entity caved.”

He also said in the interview that not only was he not biased in a leftist way, but that media in general wasn’t, despite public claims to the contrary. According to Rather, he has no bias and what happened was everyone else’s fault.

So years ago, in an attempt to smear President George W. Bush, Rather ended up disgraced and removed from the anchor desk. All these years later, He then attacked George W. Bush and others who spoke at 41’s funeral, in a petty act of what appears to be revenge.

In his tweet, he wrote, “We can’t rely on the consciences of those who have shown none or humility from those who refuse introspection.” And yet, where is his conscience or humility? He appears to have “refused introspection” following the consequences of his own disgrace.

In fact, he appears to have doubled down on it. He appears to continue to push a false narrative about bias in media and his own bias.

And his choices and behavior continue to disgrace him to this day. The choice to take swipes at speakers at a funeral, including the family of the deceased, in order to justify himself is nothing less than disgraceful behavior.

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