Richard Cohen makes some fair points today. This is not one of them:
The bloggers who were quick to spot the typographical discrepancies in CBS’s tainted documents did their job. But it is only a piece of the larger job, which is to report the news. This is what Rather and CBS did — not well enough, I grant you. But what animated them was good old-fashioned lust for the scoop. Believe me, those of us who have known such lust know it is blind. Rather would have done the same story on Kerry. It as, as Mario Puzo once pointed out in a somewhat different context, nothing personal. Just business.
I have no doubt that lust for a scoop was part of the story, part of the equation, one of the motives. But the motive wasn’t simply for a scoop, it was for an anti-Bush scoop. And, frankly, I am flummoxed that Cohen or any of the other journalistic bigwigs circling around Dan or attacking Bush are incapable of admitting this. The race for the scoop and the race to nail Bush are not incompatible theories of the case; they are mutually reinforcing.