Sidney Blumenthal has a good story about the Dan Rather lawsuit today on Salon. I haven’t seen the “mainstream” coverage of this lawsuit, but I’ve heard tell that it’s being painted as sour grapes. I guess the $70 million figure is a little hard to swallow. People in America don’t like to see people with a lot of money asking for a lot more money. Which is understandable, but in this case, the money seems like it’s more of a red herring than anything. The lawsuit is about the principles of journalism. This part gets me geeked up:

In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.

Most cases of this sort are usually settled before discovery. But Rather has made plain that he is uninterested in a cash settlement. He has filed his suit precisely to be able to take depositions.

Sadly, what I want to see will probably never happen. I want Dan Rather to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that George Bush lied about his time in the national guard. Then I want George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove to be thrown in prison for the rest of their lives. I want a law passed called “The We-Told-You-So Act” which would give all of us who knew Bush was lousy from the beginning the right to call all those who voted for him up at any hour of the day and say “I told you so”. I want to require every American to take a class called Recognizing the Obvious in which they will learn to notice the sorts of contradictions in behavior and appearance that can give clues to personality, such as “born in Connecticut to wealthy family/son of former president” (is not equal to) “salt-of-the-earth Texas cowboy” or “mispronounces every other word” (does not equal) “capable of making Americans appear reasonable”. I would like to require a complete list of the administration’s mistakes hung from every government office in the country, underneath a placard reading “Never Forget.” Finally, I would like Bush to be granted work release to personally supervise the Mission to Mars program he announced in his 2004 State of the Union address, and I would like him to be the test pilot for the rocket that he will be required to engineer and build with his own two hands.

Barring that, it would at least be nice if someone would acknowledge that Dan Rather’s story was correct. The whole fake document thing always sounded incredibly fishy to me. If you’ll recall, Dan Rather used documents in his story regarding Bush’s suspension from the National Guard that were determined to be fake by right-wing bloggers because the fonts looked wonky. The assumption being that someone went to the trouble of creating a fake memo about Bush’s poor performance in the National Guard, then funneling it through the channels until it got to Dan Rather, all the while covering their trail well enough that no one knew who created the fakes or where they originally came from. I find it more likely that OJ didn’t kill his wife. I know politics is dirty, but I can’t comprehend who would be motivated to do such a thing, or why that explanation seemed more credible to most Americans than the belief that Bush is a lazy, spoiled rich kid who used his father’s influence to avoid fighting in Vietnam and then used his powers of sloth to avoid his avoidance. If we had all studied up in our Recognizing the Obvious class as required by the United States of Me, we could have saved CBS News a lot of money and trouble.