Memogate vs. Iraqgate by Harry Browne

As you’ve probably heard already, CBS has fired four high-level employees over the scandal that erupted when "60 Minutes Wednesday" aired a story on September 8, presented by Dan Rather, alleging misdeeds by George Bush while he was in the National Guard. The memos offered in support of the allegations were later determined most likely to be false.

This, of course, brought down tons of condemnation on CBS, and especially on Dan Rather – whom Republicans have hated for years.

CBS ordered an investigation, headed by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press President Louis Boccardi. It criticized the network for airing the exposé without sufficient proof – but it didn’t attempt to determine whether the exposé itself was false. However, it did establish that the memos were false and shouldn’t have been presented.

In contrast to the religious beliefs of most conservative commentators, the investigating panel doesn’t believe the falsehood was motivated by political bias, but rather that it was aired too hastily in an attempt to scoop the competition.

It’s obviously a bad thing when a TV network peddles something that turns out to be false, and millions of people are temporarily misled about something.

But isn’t it even worse when a President peddles falsehoods, and thousands of people are killed as a result?

And yes, President Bush did lie about Iraq. When he asserted that he had ironclad evidence about various problems with Iraq – including the WMDs Iraq supposedly had – he was lying. He didn’t have ironclad evidence, he shouldn't have tried to make us believe he did, and he shouldn’t have invaded another country without such evidence.

Item	MemoGate	IraqGate
Number of falsehoods	1	At least 5 major ones, and many minor ones
Duration of time in which the falsehoods were maintained	About 1 month	Now over 2 years and no end in sight
People killed because of the falsehoods	0	Over 50,000
Investigations to determine who's at fault	1	0
Apologies made for the falsehoods	2	0
People fired because of the falsehoods	4	0
Conservative pundits making a big thing over the falsehoods	Many	None that I know of
Liberal pundits making a big thing over the falsehoods	A few	Too few
Libertarian pundits making a big thing over the falsehoods	1	Many

Seems as though too much ado has been made about a relatively harmless incident – and much too little ado about a deadly incident.