While CBS, the network of Murrow, Cronkite, and Rather has degenerated into the Katie Couric Show, Dan Rather will get a shot at covering the elections with the best this year. Many times Jon Stewert has out performed the real journalists. Tonight Dan Rather will be joining Stewert and Stephen Colbert at Comedy Central:
This is not a joke.
Dan Rather will analyze election results with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert tonight at 11 on Comedy Central’s live, hour-long Indecision 2006 special.
“It’s a risk, I guess, but what the hell,” says Rather, who covered every national election since 1962 for CBS before being drop-kicked in June. Now he’s global correspondent for Mark Cuban’s HDNet.
“J. Stewart and company offered the chance, and I’ve taken it,” Rather, 75, says. “I don’t do comedy, I do politics, which sometimes is one and the same.
“Certainly, one can’t cover politics and not have a sense of humor about it. Let’s face it, politics is often a theater of the absurd.”
Equally absurd are the corny “Ratherisms” he dragged out during many election-night marathons.
Among our faves: “If a frog had side pockets, he’d carry a handgun.” And: “This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach.”
Don’t look for such classic nuggets on tonight’s Midterm Midtacular, Rather says. (Color us disappointed.)
“Don’t expect many Ratherisms, if any. If any occur to me, I may use it, but I intend to be myself, report a bit, and have them take it from there. I’m told I will be expected to ‘play it straight,’ and then they’ll bounce off it. We’ll see.”
Rather has never been a guest of The Daily Show or Colbert Report, but he’s grateful to them for giving him a platform from which to keep his 44-year string of election coverage going.
“I’m hoping this old wreck of an anchorman and political reporter may yet have some wee something to contribute,” he says.