I expected as much. Dan isn't going out like a chump with this debacle as his swan song. He wants to ride it out, hoping that he can get by on the occasional suggestion by an expert that it's possible that some funky high-end custom-job typerwiter could have, maybe produced documents kinda-sorta looking a little like these.

CBSNews has decided to roll the dice along with him, perhaps guessing that the rest of the Old Media will let the story go (a fair gamble on CBS' part, no doubt) and perhaps half out of a sense of loyalty to long-serving Liberal Dan.

But they're just making it worse for themselves. They can continue pinning their hopes on some fanciful tinkerer's super-typerwriter only until we get the records as to what typewriters they had on the base and/or we see the other documents we know Killian produced.

Dan Rather's best play was to admit forthrightly and apologetically he may have been conned. Now he's gambling it all on the chance that conservative magazines and FoxNews will forget this story by Monday.

I find that... unlikely.

Dan Rather Retirement Watch Update

At the tone, the Dan Rather Retirement Watch displays a time of

(bong)

11:44pm -- two minutes closer to midnight (retirement)

PowerLine Weighs In: Good stuff.

Summing up:

-- They think Rather is gone, too.

-- CBSNews isn't just standing by the documents; they've also put the kaibosh on the promised internal investigation.

-- As suspcted, we should keep our eyes on a certain corrupt Texas Democratic politician involved prominently in Dan Rather's hit-piece who shares the same initials as "Barry Bonds," "Betty Brant," or even "Bruce Banner." Powerline says he has an informer.

Sweet.

Even Joshua Micah Cougar Mellancamp Marshall Seems to Accept These are Forgeries: Read him if you want; but you'll burst a bloodvessel as he explains why the charges are nevertheless true even if the documents making those charges are proveably false. And he also claims that proportional-spaced typewriters were "widely" available in 1972, which doesn't jibe with what I've read.

But long story short-- he accepts that the documents are most likely fraudulent, and that the onus is on those producing the documents to authenticate them.

Since Joshua Micah Hezekiah Bucephalus Boutros-Boutros Marshall just cried uncle, that means it can only be a matter of time before his squawking parrot mimics him.