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In the search for the real Dan Rather which has occupied so many people over
the last couple of weeks, making it the greatest sporting event since the
Tour de France, I have become acquainted with some remarkable newspersons whom I
might never have heard of if I hadn’t found them running beside me in the
pack, baying like greyhounds after the mechanical rabbit just ahead. Of course
they bay a lot louder than I do, because they lead the pack while I’m just out
for a run. I can admire them, though, even if I can’t emulate them.
The first of these is Jim Geraghty, who runs a blog called Kerry Spot, which
he updates not daily or hourly, but almost by the minute, daring you to move
away and take the risk of missing a bombshell that will finally bring CBS to
its knees begging for mercy. Today he had a beauty, for five minutes. Then it
blew up in his face. He had Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic chairman,
announcing before the forged Bush memos were released by CBS, that the National Guard
had “sugarcoated” Bush’s service record. “Sugarcoated” was exactly the
word used by the purported author of the memos to describe what he didn’t want to
do with the record. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Use of the very
same word was proof McAuliffe had knowledge of the memos before their release,
thereby involving himself in their concoction. What a scoop! Stop the presses!
It was too good to be true. Somebody had got his timing wrong. McAuliffe
had used the word in an interview after the release of the memos, not before, so
using it was not proof of guilty advance knowledge. For a minute, though, as
Lee J. Cobb said in “On the Waterfront” “they were dusting off the hot seat”
for Terry McAuliffe. Geraghty apologized, much less grudgingly than Rather
did for his tiny, insignificant, unintentional, harmless, little error of
judgment.
Well, that’s the kind of thing goes on in Geraghty’s space. Even when he’s
wrong, he’s exciting. And he’s voluminous. A scoop a minute, is his motto
and he almost lives up to it. He had plenty of them when he was printing the
reports of the bloggers taking apart the memos and proving their fraudulence.
He gave the opposition space too, but eventually the weight of evidence
overcame them and they stopped talking about ghost typewriters that that rose out of
the ground in the 70’s to write memos that exactly prefigured the ones that
computers were able to do thirty years later.
Another prolific source is Mickey Kaus, formerly with Slate magazine. He
pours out his soul without let or hindrance, scandal-skipping through the
Washington swamp. He is active in the CBS death watch too, and like Geraghty doesn’t
try to do it all himself, linking to an army of inside sources who know what’
s going on behind the scenes in the government and the media. At least they
say they do, and if they’re sometimes wrong, they’re always interesting. They
perceive the intent behind the stories now being floated about a CBS purge
and what they mean, that is, who’s being fattened up for a kill. In the offing
there’s the story of the Federal National Mortgage Association, “Fannie Mae”,
and its six top officers, all government employees, who qualified for $6
million in bonuses by deferring $200,000 in expenses to beautify the books.
There are lots of other folks out there in the “blogosphere” who will be
heard from the next time someone prominent messes up and requires exposure. It
might be over sex, over money, over election fraud, somewhere out there will be
experts who will only be too glad to explain what’s really going on and why
the official version is so much bunk. I like them.
I don’t know if this website qualifies as a blog or not, but if it doesn’t,
I’m going to try to make it one. Democracy has really arrived when everyone
with an opinion can print it up at will and circulate it to the whole world as
if he were Rush Limbaugh himself. My two cents is as good as anyone else’s,
so I’m taking a hand in the game. Too bad we didn’t have this setup when I
was a cop, so that I could have broadcast my opinions far and wide instead of
confining them to a little group of underground rebels. I can hear my former
bosses now exhaling a huge sigh of relief that I never got the chance. I would
have lashed them severely.
That goes in the might-have-been file. Today’s realities demand our
attention a lot more. We have a problem to face that overshadows all lesser concerns:
It’s the job of making sure 9/11/01 never happens again. That means we
rebuild at Ground Zero, but do it right.
One way to do it is to face facts and admit that nobody in his right mind is
going to lodge himself in an office at an elevation of 1700 feet from the
earth, conspicuously higher than the surrounding buildings, which will be full of
people admiring your courage and grateful for the fact that while you’re
there, no airplane is going to fly into them. The architect seems to have arrived
at a good solution of the problem: His P.R. is that he has defied the
terrorists and refused to surrender to them by putting up a building lower than the
ones they destroyed. We’ll show them, he says, they can’t scare us! The new
building will be even taller than the Twin Towers! Who’ll volunteer for the
top floor? Well, how about the next one down? The one after that?
The volunteers have come forward now because it turns out that the top floors
won’t actually be floors, or at lest not floors that contain offices with
people working in them. They will instead consist of lattice work in a beautiful
pattern with a large population of birds resident on the premises. But the
height will be there. The new building, the Freedom Tower, will soar above the
city’s rooftops bringing inspiration to all who gaze upon it. It will not,
however, inspire suicide bombers who don’t want to waste their precious lives
killing a lot of birds.
A perfect solution has been found. An important principle has been affirmed.
We Americans are not to be intimidated. Never. No way. On the other hand
we don’t see any sense in being unreasonable about things. So maybe the old
Towers went up to 1300 feet with offices all the way. The new Tower will rise
almost 500 feet higher than that. But the offices in it will end a couple of
hundred feet below the level where they ended in the old Tower. Above them
will be turbines, a big spire, lattice work, birds and blue sky. Somehow I
doubt that the last few floors of offices will ever get filled up. I think people
will only work at a level where they can look out the window and see other
people in other buildings at the same level, so that they don’t stand out as
the best, most isolated target in the neighborhood.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t think 9/11 is likely to be replicated.
There’ll never be a target equal to the Towers. The Empire State Building is
too strong to be brought down. The U.N. building is highly exposed, but
Al-Qaeda has friends there. There are plenty of tall targets in places outside of
New York, but that’s the trouble, they’re outside of New York. Only a hit in
Washington would have the same impact as one in New York, but the Washington
targets are low-rise and hard to hit. It’s all a terrible dilemma for the
terrorists. If it caused them to go into a fit of depression and despair of their
prospects in life, well, I have a suggestion for them…
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