CBS Big Foot Correspondent Schieffer Should be Fired for Journalistic Malpractice—Yet He Still Smiles Smugly for Defending Buddy John Edwards.

    The New York Times which shouldn’t be confused with an objective newspaper had a story yesterday with the headline: “Edwards Lies Low but That Won’t Last.”
          That former Dem presidential candidate John Edwards lies low is a given.  No contest.  
          And it adds with as much sympathy as it can muster for a lately beloved presidential possibility now reckoned a  liberal liar and glaring hypocrite that Edwards may be indicted soon by the feds in Raleigh, N.C. for allegedly knowing that some of the millions of dollars given by two wealthy donors to his presidential campaign was used to either support or hide Edwards’ now acknowledged paramour with whom he had a prolonged affair and with whom they conceived a daughter.
         The story you all know about how ten angels swearing innocence in stentorian terms couldn’t match Edwards’ eloquence up to the very minute when the National Enquirer caught him dead to rights…how this unutterably facile youngish appearing ex-Senator…polished, unruffled, entirely approachable…would lie-lie-lie without turning a hair.   Then the furtive visit to the girl friend when he visited L. A.  and his hominy grits aw-shucks Southern yawl twang confession about the trysts that occurred when his loyal and unsuspecting late wife Elizabeth’s cancer went into remission. And how Edwards looked at the cameras without blinking and said their love was imperishable.
       About how Edwards tried to get his lapdog aide to claim paternity; how the aide allegedly stole from the mistress a video showing them having sex.  All that is on the public news record.
       But politicians who lie, cheat on their spouses and show no remorse are a dime a dozen.   What isn’t is a veteran correspondent of known lefty bias who is still plying his trade under the big open Eye of CBS…carrying the title Chief Washington correspondent and host of “Face the Nation.”
         If there has ever been a villain, it is Edwards.  But the veteran correspondent of CBS known for his lefty bias, Bob Schieffer has been adroit in finding reasons not to investigate charges that verified by others became indisputably true.
        When he dies, Schieffer ought to be mummified and sent to stand in a celluloid tube at the Library of Congress—labeled Prototypical Example of the Liberal Journalist Who Has Misrepresented the Truth or Spiked It in Washington—genus Bob Schieffer CBS.  “It never occurred to him that by smothering inconvenient news to the liberal establishment he was doing wrong.”        
        Then written on the celluloid tube’s base would be what Schieffer told Don Imus after the John Edwards story broke in a source liberals find unpretty—the National Enquirer.
      “Well you know, I saw that this morning [the Enquirer story about the liaison and the illegitimate baby].  I believe that—I believe that’s a story we will be avoiding because it appears to me that there’s absolutely nothing to it. I’m told that another—a man says that the child is his [the aide Edwards hired to take the heat for Edwards]. So I guess—I guess we’re going to pass on that.  Unless you can come up with some new information on this, Don.”
      What happens to Edwards I don’t care about.   He’s dead meat along with his balderdash about there being Two Americas and he’s going to bind them as one in a herculean knot-tying achievement.
        What bothers me far more is that this so-called crème de la crème of Washington correspondents committed journalistic malpractice by airily dismissing a story that incriminated one of his good friends…and lives to laugh it off as a multi-million dollar trademark of CBS’s vaunted “integrity.”
       Oh  yes—add these words to the celluloid tube bearing the immaculately tailored mummified  Schieffer: the words he used when finding out that his close friend Edwards had been conning him and the news media:
       “Russ--just before we went on the air tonight, John Edwards called me and said he wanted to talk. He said that all this happened before he announced that he was running for president and that he told his wife  Elizabeth about it  then and that she forgave him.  He said because of that he thought it was just between them.  I’ve known John Edwards a long time and I asked him if I could talk to Elizabeth and she came to the phone. She was obviously in tears and didn’t say much but she told me that he had told her about it then and they had decided to move on.”
        More.  Edwards’ previous denials to the press, Schieffer covered this way:
      “[When asked why he lied over and over] [h]e said he just couldn’t live with the constant pounding from the tabloids [sic]. ‘It wasn’t going to stop; I was being dragged and dragged for the sake of my family I just had to end it for the sake of my family.’  So he decided to confirm it and go on, he said, for the sake of his family [sic].  He said repeatedly that he took full responsibility for this [sic].  He told me he was certain the child was not his, that the affair was over so long ago. When I asked him how Elizabeth was doing, he said she is just amazing like she always is.”
     More.
      “When I asked him why he had denied the story over and over he said because so many of the stories had so much false information. He said `what I should have done is confirm the part that was true and then live with it.’”
       A so-called journalist who has that much gullibility is a menace.