Along comes Mary

I saw Mary Mapes on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox News Channel. If MSM wants to know why it's polls are so low, all it has to do is look at her arrogant attitude and refusal to admit what is obvious to anyone else. She asked Cavuto what he knows about typesetting and kerning and typefaces, etc. It just doesn't hold up. He asked her why she felt she had to push that particular story so close to the election. She snootily replied that she was "covering" George Bush. But that doesn't explain why she thought that a 30 year old claim that had been covered over was so urgent. She was so overheated in her desire to defeat him, that she still doesn't seem to understand that even if the memos put on the air were real, nobody really cared, and that her explanations for their having been produced on Microsoft Word and copied a zillion times so that they couldn't really be authenticated just make her look loony to anybody but another member of the "60 Minutes" team like Mike Wallace, who also came across as a naif when he asked his son on Fox News Sunday "do you really believe . . ." in a tone that suggested people who question Rather's and Mapes' good faith are fools.

Sorry, Mike, Dan and Mary. We weren't born yesterday, and the burden is not on us the viewers to disprove what you tell them. In Dan's words, "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, . . . It's a duck!" And if it's as obvioulsy phoney at those "Memos" were, don't insult our intelligence!

She should be banned from the news industry, but she probably won't need to work any more.