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Dan Rather made out big at the Media Research Center's Dishonor Awards in January. He won the "Gilligan Award" for the Flakiest Comment of the Year and was then selected by the audience for the Quote of the Year! All for insisting that Bill Clinton, although he had lied, was still an honest man! "I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things." Dan Rather still stands by that assessment. February 7, he appeared on Imus in the Morning, MSNBC, by phone and wholeheartedly insisted: "Look, he lied. He lied but he shouldn't have lied. He lied and tried to cover it up. My point to Bill (O'Reilly), and I have no apology for it, it's the rare person - Bill may be that person - but it's the rare person who can say, you know, 'Never in my life have I ever told a lie. Particularly, I've never told a lie when, you know, my whole career might rest on it.' "Now, there are plenty of people who have argued with it, but I think the fact that someone has told a lie, even a big lie or maybe several big lies over a lifetime, does not mean that they're an inherently dishonest person. But, you know, this may mark me as one of those people - I believe in redemption and that Bill Clinton - is he an honest person? I think he is an honest person. Did he lie? Yes, he lied, and on those occasions he was dishonest." Tough to follow his logic, but wait! Dan isn't finished! "A lot of this is just dancing on the head of a pin. Well, I think we understand, Imus, that, you know, people like O'Reilly, they are never gonna say anything good about Bill Clinton. And anybody who says anything good about him is gonna be castigated by them and maybe that's fair enough. My own view is that, though I'm a reporter and I try to report deep down the middle and try to allow for, you know, human mistakes. And from Richard Nixon right on through Bill Clinton, you know, politicians at the top when they make mistakes they pay big prices and they should pay big prices. And so that's sort of the context in which that was said. But I don't have any argument with anyone who wants to say, 'Well, Dan, I think you've made a mistake.' My answer to that is, 'Man, I've made a lot of mistakes over my lifetime.'" Amazing! But this is Dan Rather in his own words. As Brent Baker of the Media Research Center summed it up, "If you can lie 'about any number of things' and still be honest in Dan Rather's mind, then I guess you can be biased in any number of stories and still be a 'down the middle' reporter. Read more here: MRC CyberAlert, 02/12/2002
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