What is Rathergate?
1.
The scandal from September, 2004 in which the CBS program “60 Minutes II” presented as evidence (in a muckraking report attacking President Bush) several forged documents supposedly dating from Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972.
Subsequent analysis of the documents by various blogs showed that they could not have been created by any technology available contemporaneous with Bush’s service.
The word is a contraction of Dan Rather and Watergate, along the same “-gate” principles that has dominated American scandal-naming since (coincidentally) 1972.
The use of a superscripted “th” in the alleged documents - a sophisticated typesetting technique that was almost unheard of in early ’70s typewriters yet which is the default setting for modern-day Microsoft Word, thereby becoming one of the most damning bits of evidence in the forgery.
The debunking of these “TANG documents” is seen as a turning point in the history of blogs, the day when the mainstream media realized it no longer had a monopoly on the public discourse.
Despite the Krazy Kos Kidz' and Chomskyite's assertions to the contrary, Rathergate yet again showed the intellectual dishonesty, liberal bias, and ethical lapses of mainstream media.
Due to the egregious shame involved, pseudointellectual "progressives" had to remove their ring tones of Dan saying: "Courage, courage".
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