According to the Wall Street Journal‘s excellent editorial this morning, “the big news” isn’t CBS’s mea culpa that it was “misled.”
The story is the admission that the source Dan Rather trusted with CBS’s reputation was none other than Bill Burkett, a noted antagonist of President Bush.
The real scandal (unless more conniving with the Kerry campaign comes to light) is that Burkett, widely known as an avid, active, occasionally vitriolic anti-Bush Democratic partisan, was repeatedly described by CBS as an “unimpeachable” source.
Maybe they meant, you know, like Bill Clinton…. [But Clinton was impeached! I know, but he wasn’t successfully impeached, so my point still holds.]
He was successfully impeached; impeachment is the House’s function (I think it corresponds to arraignment). The trial is the Senate’s part of the process, and the Senate acquitted him.
CBS used “unimpeachable” as a double entendre. To the general public it meant “fully reliable” and “beyond reproach”. To CBS it meant that the person who gave them the papers didn’t hold an office that they could be impeached from (ie:”We didn’t get the papers from George Bush.”.
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im