A Rather unfair burden

JESSE JACKSON

_C BS anchor Dan Rather apol-
ogized this week. He admit-
ted that CBS had been
snookered by a source that lied
and provided documents that were
fake about George W. Bush's serv-
ice in the National Guard during
the Vietnam years. Ironically, al-
though the documents were fake,
the story was true: Bush did use
family connections to avoid the
draft, ducked the war in the Na-
tional Guard, and then shirked his
responsibilities while serving in
the Guard. Rather had the right
facts, but the wrong source.
The right-wing chorus started
baying immediately. Bill Bennett
accused CBS of being guilty of
''corruption.'' Others called for
Rather to resign. No liberals came
to the defense of Rather or CBS.
What a contrast with President
Bush. We now know that everything
he told us about the war in Iraq was
false. There were no weapons of
mass destruction. Saddam Hussein
had no connections with al-Qaida
and no involvement in Sept. 11. His
regime was crumbling under sanc-
tions and inspections. The war on
Iraq wasn't part of the war on ter-
ror, it was a distraction from it.
Bush accused Iraq of trying to
purchase uranium in Africa on the
basis of fake documents. The presi-
dent used the claim in his State of the Union address painting Iraq as
a clear and present danger. Yet
when the administration turned the
documents over to the International
Atomic Energy Agency, that agency
determined in two hours -- after a
routine Google search -- that the
documents were crude forgeries.
Rather rushed a story onto the
air. Bush rushed a nation into war.
Rather apologized, but we have yet
to hear any apology from the pres-
ident for taking America to war on
false pretenses.
Instead, he has ducked -- claim-
ing for months that we still might
find weapons. He has transformed
the rationale of the war -- from
stopping the ''gathering threat''
that Saddam posed to nation
building and bringing democracy
to Iraq. He has intentionally mis-
led Americans about Saddam's
connection to terror.
__________
Why hold a TV anchor
to a higher standard than
a president?
Pundits all agree that the CBS
mistake in judgment badly dam-
aged the credibility of one of
America's leading news organiza-
tions. But few write about how the <
president's credibility has been de-
stroyed across the world.
Bush says the Iraq war proved to
the world that the United States
was true to its word. In fact, the op-
posite is true: It proved to the world
that this president and his adminis-
tration will peddle the most egre-
gious lies to get their way, and that
even Secretary of State Colin Pow-
ell, the man with the most interna-
tional credibility, cannot be trusted
to tell the truth. Powell, ironically,
sort of apologized for his dramatic
U.N. speech on the eve of the war
that turned out to be a patchwork
quilt of falsehoods.
It is bizarre that the punditry
should be in greater moral outcry
over a news organization that
rushed a story to print on the basis
of forged documents than a White
House that rushed a nation to war
on the basis of lies, distortions, fake
documents and false intelligence.
Perhaps more incredible is that
the president continues to ignore
and distort reality, to lie and mis-
lead about what is going on in Iraq
-- and the media seem likely to let
him get away with it. Four years
ago, when Al Gore was running,
the media constantly peddled re-
ports -- most of them false charges
cooked up by Republicans -- that
Gore was inflating his record or ex
aggerating his past. Gore's credi-
bility suffered accordingly.
Now the president is simply ig-
noring reality, painting Iraq as
verging on democracy, even as the
military worries about our position
collapsing. He claims the support
of the Iraqi people when polls
show the only thing that unifies
Iraqis is their desire for the occu-
pation to end.
He claims Iraq is an advance in
the war on terror, when in fact his
catastrophic debacle, by all inde-
pendent assessments, has been a
recruiting boon for al-Qaida, as bin
Laden's popularity soars across the
Muslim world and the reputation
of the United States plummets.
Why hold a TV anchor to a
higher standard than a president?
Is the press too intimidated to chal-
lenge the president's distortions,
depriving voters of the independent
voice so vital to a democracy?