Sometimes, big stories like Ra^thergate cause me to neglect the Classical Values theme. When this happens, something will usually come along to catapult me back a millenium or two.

In a previous post, I speculated that a major motivation for the Dan Rather/CBS coverup was to prevent the network from being embarrassed once it was learned that they were taking cues from lunatic fringe nuts. (More here about the latter.)

I cited a couple of examples of mental pathology, but now I see that I need have looked no further than Rather himself:

Rather isn't a liberal hack. He's bonkers.

What other reporter could get away with the spontaneous fits of rage and the homespun corniness that are his trademarks? Raised in Texas, Rather reads the news in a colloquial rat-a-tat: Paul Harvey as performed by Bill O'Reilly. He peppers his copy with aphorisms—e.g., "that dog won't hunt"—and for a while ended the Evening News with a single, baffling word: "Courage."

Rather's taste for the absurd goes beyond mere oratorical style, according to Peter J. Boyer's excellent book Who Killed CBS? In 1981, Rather decided that he couldn't occupy Walter Cronkite's chair, so for his first Evening News broadcast he read the headlines while crouching behind the desk. When a rival TV journalist ambushed him outside of CBS headquarters—a favorite tactic of the 60 Minutes gang—Rather instructed the reporter, "Get the microphone right up, will you?" Then he barked, "Fuck you." The clip played on television for days. Then there's Rather's odd penchant for costumes. He once trekked across the Afghan border on foot and returned with hours of dazzling reporting—all of which he undermined by wearing a ludicrous peasant disguise on camera. TV critics lashed him with the nickname "Gunga Dan."

Rather's most embarrassing tantrum came during the 1987 U.S. Open tennis tournament. When producers told him a match would run long and truncate the Evening News, Rather disappeared and left the network with more than six minutes of dead air. (Such was Rather's cachet that no executive dared summon a replacement.) And don't forget the 1986 "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" attack, in which Rather was accosted by street toughs on Park Avenue in New York. You can hardly blame Rather for that one, but Boyer notes that such things rarely seem to happen to Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings. It's as if Rather attracts half the madness in the universe, and the other half comes out of his mouth.

What makes him bluster? Some say Rather, who attended Sam Houston State College, tries to compensate for his brittle education with hard-charging brio. He often tells a story from his days as a young CBS correspondent, when he bought a Great Books series and plowed through all the volumes. Rather didn't wear his newfound erudition lightly. Once, during a tense moment at the network, he lectured his colleagues, "I only have one thing to say to all of you people. Syracuse, 413." Producers were baffled. Only later did they realize that Rather kept a copy of Sir Edward Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World on his desk—Syracuse, 413 B.C., was in Chapter 2.

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who tantalizes us about the story's canine conclusion. WOOF!)

It would be a shame to leave out the Buckwheats (although I think Ra^ther has now acquired them).

Or projection:

Dan Rather has almost always deflected questions about his bias and lapses in journalistic ethics by dismissing all who question him as partisans. Sigmund Freud coined a term for this psychological condition – projection – the innate tendency to project one’s own traits onto others, e.g., of a thief to assume that everybody else is a thief. Those who call me a partisan, says Rather, are obviously partisans.

"You have to understand that Dan Rather is Richard Nixon," Goldberg in Bias recounted a colleague telling him. "If he sees you as an enemy even for a second, you're an enemy for life. And like Nixon, Rather must destroy his enemies…[and] has become what he detested."

“Who among us have not lied about somebody?” said Rather to Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly regarding the veracity of President Bill Clinton. “I think you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things.”

Let's stick to saner themes.

Or classical themes like Syracuse:

Led by Nicias, a large Athenian army of about 25,000 troops landed near Syracuse in Sicily in the fall of 415 bc. Their goal was to expand the Athenian empire and to deprive Sparta of a supply source by conquering Syracuse. The Athenians built a double wall around Syracuse and laid siege. The Syracusans were close to surrendering when a small advance force of 2,000 men led by the Spartan Gylippus arrived. Gylippus was able to know the Athenians off balance with a series of raids and the building of counter walls. In the spring of 413 bc. Demosthenes arrived with Athenian reinforcements. Demosthenes led a large scale assault that was repulsed. After the Syracusans destroyed many of the Athenian ships, the Athenians attempted to escape inland. Eventually the Athenians were forced to surrender and Demosthenes and Nicias were both executed. The defeat at Syracuse marked the beginning of the end of the dominance of Athens.

Here's Victor Davis Hanson on Syracuse and the Fog of battle:

So the fifth-century B.C. military historian Thucydides commented on the confusion of battle on the heights above Syracuse (413 B.C.), and, indirectly, on the inability of historians such as himself to sort out the conflicting accounts provided by veterans of all battles.

Fear, panic, noise, dust, motion, all the rare stimuli that so overwhelm the everyday senses, combine with the vagaries of memory both to inflate and to diminish what happens in those rare brief seconds when men's lives are won or lost. Such are the usual burdens of military history, both ancient and modern. When investigating the death of my namesake on Okinawa, or reconstructing some of my father's 39 B-29 missions, I was struck by the difficulty in reconciling all the oral remembrances of the combatants, both with one another and with supposedly "official" histories of the theater.

I think Ra^ther may have developed his own case of "the Buckwheats." Repeated nightmares of Spartans wearing pajamas have a way of doing that.

(Not that I blame him. Legions of pajama-wearing Spartans would scare me too.)