Happened to hear from Winners Only Nick, still living out in Hollywood all these years, who encouraged me to put up a new Dan Rather post. Well.

Winners Only is one of the very few people who know the background to this little blog getting started, and it was the original Rathergate kerfuffle. By then I'd long since stopped believing that major news media were anything but a special interest group advancing their own policy agendas by other means. But what gave me pause was one thought: how many more forgeries, falsehoods, and outright lies had trusted news sources shoved down our guileless throats?

Anyway, that was tipping point, and I started blogging.

So now Rather is back from near-obscurity with a $70 million suit against CBS, his former employer. The piling on of ridicule and scorn has begun, as Marx's famous line about history repeating first as tragedy and second as farce will ring true for a good many people. "Schadenfreude alert" ? That won't be the half of it...Rather's saga has already devolved to the point where he's being lumped with OJ as an example of a "kind of sociopathic behavior created in part by our culture of celebrity". Yikes.

Of course, these types of law suits very rarely go to trial, almost always being settled beforehand. A shame really. Subjecting Dan and CBS to the cold light of legal review would be a sobering experience for all Americans.

And just in case I thought I was taking this too seriously, I checked Treacher, who doesn't disappoint.