At the New York Post, John Podhoretz says Dan Rather’s plea that CBS was “misled” is hopelessly inadequate: Dan in Denial.

September 21, 2004 — CBS and Dan Rather now want us to believe they were “misled.” And it’s likely they were misled in the days and hours before they aired the forged documents claiming, among other things, that George W. Bush disobeyed a direct order from his superior in the National Guard.

But when Rather & Co. refused to accept that the documents were forgeries when every rational person on the planet who had spent 10 minutes looking into the matter could see they were the crudest of forgeries, they were no longer “misled.”

Nor were Rather & Co. “misled” when they continued to say that nobody had challenged the underlying basis of their story — though in fact every single aspect of their disgraceful pseudo-journalism had been called into powerful question.

They were not “misled” when Rather said the day after his appalling pseudo-story aired that the people challenging the validity of the story and the authenticity of the documents were all “partisan operatives” — when in fact one of his principal challengers is a California jazz musician and Web site designer who has never voted Republican.

A small correction for the record, so no one tries to yell “gotcha!” after looking through our archives: I voted Republican for the first time in 2003, for Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you know what? It didn’t hurt at all.