That's the beautiiful thing about all of this: no one cares. Rather and CBS just jettisoned their credibility for nothing.

When your enemies are doing their best to commit suicide, best leave them alone and allow them to finish the job. I'm fairly positive that White House knew it was fake the moment they look at it. Why should they stop the world from seeing what it really is?

The question is how you respond to it, and how good you are at identifying it as soon as you see it.

Marriage is wonderful, but it requires constant compromises and losses of certain types of freedom.

Doubly so for kids, unless you suck as a parent.

Cars have made us a lot more free. But cars can kill us. So can electricity.

Maybe it's a restatement of the old adage: "There's no such thing as a free lunch." Nothing is ever without its costs.

I guess a question that could be explored at this point is if, in fact, lacking such a pied piper, we do in the long term actually become more fragmented.

The downside of multiple voices is that we don't have that shared national experience. As big as InstaPundit is, the vast majority of the public has never heard of it, let alone read it.

The same is true for the fact that there is no longer the equivalent of a M*A*S*H, which almost everyone watched. It's better in most ways that people can watch shows tailored for them instead but it comes at a modest price.

Fragmentation isn't 100% good but is preferable to limited choice.

I moved to the Washington, D.C. area in January 1998. I was staying with a friend while I searched for a job and an apartment, and I was fixated on that. I wasn't into the Internet at the...

And, like Bithead, I've been curious about just how high a price we've paid over the last several decades for that seeming unity.

Wistful?
Hell, man, I'm THANKFUL that no such 'unifier' exists... Because without the side checking, we'd never know what kind of unity we were dedicating ourselves to.

Many times in the past I have suggested that the example of left wing bias that is Dan Rather is not limited to him but is endemic to the breed of cockroach that infests West 57th. If Rather is biased, and the org behind him, (And I think the idea that both are so is unquestionable)... what indication do we have that Cronkite was not, when he ran the show.. particularly given Cronkite's more recent history?

Can you *imagine* what kind of chance the truth would have, had Dan Rather been the smooth talker that Cronkite was? Can you, for example, see the kind of questions we now see being raised about Rather's bias, and his truthfulness in general, and these forged Bush/Guard documents in particular, 30 years ago, when Cronkite ran the show? I know I can't.

Granted that most of the current problems rather has involves fact checking by the Internet. But such fact checking would be harder to get started, I think, if Rather had the Cronkite Pipe and Slippers aura.

Then again, perhaps the cross checking done by the net of today, would have prevented that aura from taking on the stature that it did. Which to my mind raises some degree of question about the history of the 60's. Think; Conkite, since his retirement, has exposed himself as a far leftist, which more or less confirmed our mostly unspoken (at that time) fear about the MSM.

One wonders, then, if the man didn't succeed is inflicting more damage on us than he might have, when he was on the air, had he been a less capable communicator. Since the victors write the history books, (and in the context of the US, the Intelligencia is unabashedly leftist, they also are the ones who *teach* history) we may never really know.

In any event, it seems to me trust of the MSM in the future will be earned at a much higher price. And I don't see any one individual able to claim that particular crown.

Given what we've had with such royalty in the past, I can't say I'm displeased at all.