Right Hope

Remember Dan Rather? Since he lost his job at CBS for presiding over a knowingly false news story on 60 Minutes in 2004 that was designed to paint George W Bush as a draft-dodger, Dan has been in exile on HDNet.   Here, he's free to keep posing as an objective journalist, passing off his one-hour "Dan Rather Report" position pieces as news stories.

I just finished watching his "report" on the Castle Doctrine -- the recent law, passed now in most states in the union, that protects a citizens right to defend himself and his or her property with deadly force.  Dan's report essentially consisted of around 5 stories of extreme cases where the law was taken to the extreme and criminals were shot and killed while fleeing.   Such examples were used to support Dan's point that the law is leading to vigilante justice and anarchy in the streets.   Of course, there was plenty of commentary from smart folks at Harvard that attributed passage of such laws to our new paranoid ,post 9/11 culture.  The most comical comment:  "If you exercise the right to use deadly force in self-defense, you have to prove that your fear is reasonable."  I'll remember to stop and consider that the next timee a burglar is heading up the stairs to my bedroom. 

Let this non-Harvard educated correct them.  Yes, many of us are concerned for our safey after 9/11.  But we are even more concerned about being killed by local criminals that have no qualms about killing police offers.  And if we are lucky enough to turn the tables, we get to look forward to prosecution by twisted attorneys, and persecution by criminal-loving left-wingers in the media.   The only good comment on this program came from the female former head of the NRA responsible for the first Castle Law passing in Florida.   She reminded Dan that people thought that they already had the protections bestowed in the Castle Doctrine, when in fact they did not.  This new law is providing clarity, not adding to confusion.   Nobody wants to shoot shoplifters as Dan suggests.   What we do want is for the laws to protect the people who react to preserve their lives, rather than those who initiate the chain of events that brings danger to all.  

Not once in this program did Dan ever actually define what the law states in full.  And not once did Dan cite examples where citizens acted properly within the new law (I've read about many).   Selecting facts to fit your position is not news.  It is "advocacy journalism" at best, but more like propaganda.   Perhaps if Dan understood this, he'd still have his job at CBS.