R.I.P. JOHNNY RAMONE.

ROGER SIMON has lots of interesting posts, and many of them have nothing to do with Dan Rather.

IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU’VE MISSED THE THREAD of the “Ra^therGate” CBS forged-memo story, this report from The Scotsman provides a useful roundup. Pajamas are mentioned, though they’re spelled “pyjamas.”

Also, today’s Marketplace radio show from PRI has a nice piece on blogs and Ra^therGate. (You’ll have to stream the whole show, as they don’t break out individual segments like NPR. It starts at about 12:30 into the broadcast.) Pajamas are mentioned there, too.

UPDATE: Ah, you can find the link to the individual story on this page. Or just click here. (Thanks to reader Dave Shardell). It’s worth a listen.

And Hugh Hewitt writes on what happens when you don’t defend the brand. “Didn’t anyone at Viacom or CBS go to HBS?” He contrasts the Ra^therGate experience with the famous story of how Johnson & Johnson responded to the Tylenol scare.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF notes some ironies.

IN LIGHT OF THE ONGOING BIG-MEDIA VS. THE PAJAMA-PEOPLE TALK, it’s worth noting that I still regard the relationship as more symbiotic than adversarial, though I have to say that reading this column by Edward Wasserman from just last week is, well, especially amusing in the wake of Ra^therGate.

MICKEY KAUS has questions for Dan Rather and his staff.

LEONARD NIMOY as Dan Ra^ther.

ERIC S. RAYMOND is back to the blogosphere.

LOTS MORE ON RA^THERGATE over at Best of the Web. Plus, we learn that James Taranto will be on O’Reilly tonight talking about Dan Rather’s travails.

TOM MAGUIRE has lots of interesting posts.

STEVE VERDON recalls earlier predictions of InstaPundit’s demise, which turned out to be premature.

WILFRED BRIMLEY strikes again! “Is it true?” “No, but it is accurate.”

UPDATE: Heh.

BLAME IOWA: BoiFromTroy is imagining what the election would be like if Dick Gephardt were the nominee. At the very least, the bumper stickers would be amusing. . . .

Let’s imagine what today’s election would be like if Gephardt were the nominee:

The Democratic Convention would have focused on issues, not a 35 year-old war.

There would have been no Swift Boat vets.

There would have been no debate over whether serving in the National Guard were honorable or if it was tantamount to being a deserter (both Bush and Dick served in the Guard during Vietnam)

There would have been no Rather-Gate/Forged Memos to distract the American people from Iraq, etc.

On the whole, John Kerry has been a distraction from his own campaign. Because of him and his need to focus on four months of his biography, the American people have been denied an honest debate about the issues that we would have had, if only Iowans would have picked Dick.

But I think he’s onto something. I agree with Hugh Hewitt that the candidate is a big problem:

Kerry’s problem is that he is simply the worst major party candidate of my lifetime, period running against a likeable incumbent backed by a growing economy and a record of bold action in the global war on terrorism.

Yeah. You’ve never seen me sing the praises of George W. Bush the way that, say, Andrew Sullivan was doing at one point. I think he’s okay, and he at least takes seriously the notion that we’re at war, and he seems steady, and not flighty. But overall, really, I give him a B. Maybe a B-. Trouble for the Democrats is that they’ve nominated a guy who gets — at the very most charitable — a weak gentleman’s C.

I’m not crazy about Gephardt, especially on trade, but he takes the war seriously and he seems steady and not flighty, too.

The Democrats’ problem is that the base, which, like bases do, cares mostly about emotional returns, wanted Howard Dean. But the leadership, which, like leaderships do, cares about status and connections and thus about winning, knew that Dean couldn’t win. They tried to split the difference with Kerry, whom they thought could fool the gullible folks in flyover country into seeing him as a more-macho version of Bush, while winking to the base that he was really a tall Howard Dean with some medals. This was a dumb idea, and it hasn’t worked.

Worse yet, if it does somehow get Kerry elected, he’ll be a cripple as soon as he’s sworn in. The anybody-but-Bush crowd won’t have any particular reason to support him once he’s given them what they want, and he doesn’t have much in the way of another constituency. It’s telling that he doesn’t really even have the usual tight-knit “mafia” of longtime supporters the way that Bush, or Clinton, had. He’s got a revolving-door assembly of party apparatchiks and paid consultants. That’s a bad sign.

So, yeah, blame Iowa. I wish we were seeing the election BoiFromTroy envisions, instead of the one we’ve got now.

PLAME UPDATE: I’m not sure what this means, but I don’t think it bodes well for the conspiracists.

CHANNELING CHEAP TRICK? MoveOn calls for surrender. But I think they just gave themselves away.

UPDATE: Bob Dole doesn’t like the ad:

It’s one thing to debate whether we should take the fight to the terrorists, but depicting an American soldier in effect surrendering in the battle against the terrorists is beyond the pale.

I cannot believe that John Kerry, who reminds us daily of his Vietnam service, would possibly approve the disgusting and demoralizing portrayal of American soldiers fighting for us in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. . . .

This defeatist attitude undermines the great progress and sacrifices of our men and women in the military and the contributions of our allies who are fighting against terror and standing up for freedom around the world.

The politics of pessimism that is being pursued by John Kerry and the extreme liberals demonstrates they are consumed by the past with nothing to offer but attacks on the President’s agenda for creating a safer world.

Read the whole thing.

JOSH MARSHALL TAKES THE BAIT: President Bush gave a speech yesterday in which he equated membership in state militias with membership in the National Guard. That’s silly, and Josh Marshall points out the silliness of equating the two. (And here’s another example — I’ve got a commission as a Colonel in the Tennessee Militia, which may or may not still be valid since it’s signed by Lamar Alexander, and which at any rate amounts to no more than a certificate on my wall — but still, I’m not a member of the National Guard.)

But wait a minute. We’ve heard for years from the left that the Second Amendment only protects a right to arms on the part of the state militias, and that those, nowadays, are the same as the National Guard. (The Brady Campaign, for example, talks about “Today’s equivalent of a ‘well-regulated’ militia – the National Guard.”)

Watch as people pile on Bush for this statement, uttering quotable bits about the obvious distinction between state militias and the National Guard, which can be brought up in debates and court cases on the right to arms later.

To paraphrase Wilfred Brimley in Absence of Malice: “Mr. Rove, are you that smart?”

UPDATE: I wonder what self-described Second Amendment enthusiast John Kerry has to say about this question?

Just remember: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, it looks like Kerry agrees with Bush:

For more than three centuries, as you know better than anyone, our National Guard has stood on the frontlines of freedom. The Guard fought in that first great revolution, and has defended our country ever since, here in America and around the world.

The official “National Guard” dates to the Dick Act of 1903 — so Kerry must be counting the militias. For more on this stuff, read this.

A HAYEKIAN PERSPECTIVE on why blogging works.

HOLMAN JENKINS: “The network didn’t just fall for fake documents; it reportedly used fake documents to pressure/entice its other ‘source,’ notorious Texas pol Ben Barnes, into publicly claiming he helped pull strings to get Mr. Bush into the Guard and giving CBS a ‘scoop.’ From a journalistic standpoint, that’s very, very bad — the kind of ‘mistake’ it’s hard to recover from.”

HEH: “If they were done in Word™, your defense is absurd.”

CBS RATINGS ARE PLUNGING: So much for the theory that this was a ratings-boosting stunt. This story also reports some growing unhappiness among affiliates, though I suspect that’s just starting to take off, as rather a lot of readers have been sending me copies of the complaint letters they’re sending to their local affiliates, but that’s just started since last night.

BILL ADAMS: “Rather doesn’t realize that with Knox’s testimony, he’s convicted himself. . . . But in context, her interview makes Rather’s fact-checking team look worse, not better.”

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein: “Were I to stake my reputation as a world-class lover on the say-so of an ex-girlfriend’s 86-year old mother, you’d be justified in your skepticism. ”

JAMES LILEKS:

In any case, the whole “fake but accurate” line shows how tone-deaf these people are; it’s like saying a body in a pine box is “dead but lifelike.” It boggles, it really does: the story is true, the evidence is faked, but the evidence reflects the evidence we have not yet presented that proves our conclusion – ergo, we’re telling the truth. They just can’t give it up; they just can’t say the memos were typed by the guy in the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” commercial and leave it be, because that that puts the knife in the story regardless of what happened. So they keep going.

The lifelike corpse is CBS’s reputation. And it’s not looking all that lifelike anymore. . . .

David Hogberg fires up the crematorium with this dissection of Andrew Heyward’s statement. “The statement reflects an organization that is arrogant, bullheaded, and in denial. It is an organization whose credibility is shot, and whose reputation will soon lie in ashes.”

I would say “ouch,” but a dead body feels no pain.

JEEZ: Over 440,000 pageviews yesterday. No wonder the server seemed a bit slow.

UPDATE: To be honest, except for a little while last night, the server didn’t seem especially slow, and I had no idea of the traffic until I happened to look at the stats today. The Hosting Matters folks handle this so well that I’m blissfully unaware of server loads.

DIGITAL CAMERAS: Via DPreview.com, a link to a brochure for the forthcoming Nikon D2x, a 12.4 megapixel digital SLR. I want one already. . . .

Actually, since I’m getting really good 20×30 prints from the Nikon D70 that I already own, I don’t know that I need more. But it’s awfully cool.

What I’d really like is this Nikkor 12-24 zoom lens, but it’s kind of pricey. If anyone knows of a good collection of reviews on compatible lenses for the D70, drop me a line. (Please put “Lens” in the subject line, so it doesn’t get lost in the unbelievable flood of email I’m getting these days.)

Readers in or near New York might be interested in this photobloggers’ get-together at the Apple Store in Soho on September 30.

BLOOM COUNTY ON DAN RATHER: Some things don’t change.

UPDATE: More cartoon-related observations here. And, yes, this is becoming rather comic, in a Wile E. Coyote ongoing-disasters sort of way.