Fired CBS Staffer Victim of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Mary Mapes, who was fired by CBS after having produced an episode of “60 Minutes 2” that used faked documents to show that George was derelict in his National Guard duties, shows no repentance for the fiasco.

October 5, 2005 -- THE producer at the center of last year’s “Memogate” scandal at CBS News says she was derailed by a vast right-wing conspiracy.

The producer, Mary Mapes, is one of four CBS staffers fired last January in the wake of the scandal.

She is convinced she was the victim of a group of loosely associated Internet bloggers “with a harsh political bent” who pounced on CBS News minutes after the airing of the now-infamous Texas Air National Guard story on “60 Minutes 2” in September 2004.

“Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Websites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line,” writes Mapes in the first chapter of her new book about the reaction to the story.

“They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.”

Those evil right wingers. You try to smear George Bush with forged documents, and they get mad at you.

Mapes, like Rather himself, appears to be in deep denial. They were apparently so sure that the charges against Bush must be true that they didn’t critically scrutinize the evidence. And they still can’t seem to accept that they screwed up badly.