What a difference a year makes, eh Mary Mapes?

Just think…a year ago you were a big shot producer at the “Tiffany Network” of CBS. You had gofers at your beck and call. A nice, fat, expense account. A couple of awards under your belt. The fawning admiration of your colleagues. Dan Rather even said hello to you in the CBS cafeteria.

Now, you’re a wreck:

I was extremely battered,” she said in an interview yesterday. “I’d had months and months of having my head kicked around a soccer stadium by much of the Western world. I needed some time to regroup.”

Just goes to show that the more elevated your own opinion of yourself, the farther you fall when you blow it. And Mary, let’s face it; you screwed the pooch big time.

But don’t worry. It appears you are landing on your feet, as your ilk usually does. And what better parachute to hang on to than a chatty, tell-all book in which everyone is accused of being against you, or undermining you, or trying to destroy you. It makes for great copy if not very accurate story telling. But hey! At this point, who’s keeping track?

“I’m a human being; I do things wrong from the first breath I take in the morning,” Mapes said. “I don’t in any way feel I am without responsibility in this. . . . I probably shouldn’t have been as pliable or as malleable as I was” when her bosses were finalizing the story. “This is a huge shortcoming. I didn’t know how to say no. . . . I was trying very hard to please them.”

There, there, little one. You also seem to have trouble saying “no” to partisanship. Remember that call to Kerry campaign mouthpiece Joe Lockhart offering to put serial liar and mentally disturbed Bill Burkett in touch with the Kerry campaign? Of course, that was just in furtherance of the story, right? It had nothing to do with trying to get the opposition party to help you smear the President of the United States in a time of war. After all, you’re just a victim of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

“Truth and Duty” unloads on Rove, the White House senior adviser, calling him “the mastermind of the Republican attack against the story.” Asked about this, Mapes said Rove was “an inspirational figure” for the critics. “I’m not saying I had any proof at all” of his involvement.

I am continually fascinated with the left’s fear of Karl Rove. It reminds me of the way the Union Army looked upon Robert E. Lee during the civil war. Prior to the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, Union Generals were fretting that Lee would slip around their flank as he had on numerous occasions. The usually phlegmatic Ulysses S. Grant exploded upon hearing this saying “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time.” This is the way the left sees Rove – as some kind of magic man who can not only cast a spell to bewitch the American people but also call upon his minions to do his evil bidding. I wonder if Captain Ed, the Powerline boys, Charles Johnson, and Michelle Malkin – the biggest conservative bloggers – laugh out loud when they read that they’re in Rove’s pocket and can be activated whenever The Evil One feels the need.

It takes a special kind of stupidity to believe that you are right when everyone else on the planet says you’re wrong:

She is disdainful of Moonves, the CBS president who ordered the outside investigation. “He doesn’t know journalism from dirt farming,” Mapes said. In the book, noting that Moonves courted and then married “Early Show” anchor Julie Chen, she writes: “I used to say everything Les knows about journalism had been sexually transmitted. Now I know even that hasn’t taught him much.”

She says Viacom, CBS’s corporate parent, threw her overboard because Chief Executive Sumner Redstone feared regulatory retaliation by the Bush administration.

There’s a clinical term for that kind of fantasy; paranoid delusion. There is not one shred of evidence that the Bush White House has ever even contemplated using the FCC to “intimidate” networks. In order to posit that notion, you’ve got to make it up out of whole cloth; something Mary Mapes is an expert at doing.

She’s also an expert at the put down:

Mapes is dismissive of Marian Carr Knox, the 86-year-old former secretary to Bush’s late squadron commander, who told Rather she believed the memos were fake but the substance of the documents was true. Mapes called her “maddening” and “a quite self-righteous typist.”

Being an expert in “self-righteous,” I can see where Mary Mapes would recognize that personality trait – especially in an 86-year old woman who by all reports knew a helluva lot more about the authenticity of those memos than you did.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of “why?” Why go after a story that’s 30 years old?

“Bush didn’t keep his promise to the country,” Mapes writes. “He swore he would fly military jets until May 1974 . . . .”

No Mary, he swore to serve the country until May of 1974 , something he did honorably which is more than can be said about you . The last time I looked, the oath taken upon entering military service does not specify anything like “I will faithfully drive a tank” or “I will gladly work as a PR flack” or even “I will command a swift boat for a couple of months and then carry on with traitorous anti-war activities while still in uniform.”

And what about us, your favorite people, the bloggers?

Perhaps her greatest fury is reserved for the “vicious” bloggers who pounced on the “60 Minutes II” report within hours—and who she believes provided the map that major news organizations, including The Washington Post, essentially followed.

“I was attacked, Dan was attacked, CBS was attacked 24 hours a day by people who hid behind screen names,” Mapes said. “I may be a flawed journalist, but I put my name on things.” Some of the key bloggers, however, posted criticism under their own names.

Okay, let me get this straight. The “map” supplied by bloggers to newspapers like the Washington Post contained information vetted by thousands of individuals with more expertise than any of the “experts” you retained to authenticate those memos (whose judgment you ignored anyway) and you have the unmitigated gall to say that bloggers were “attacking” you? Could it be because you were standing by a bogus story that you had cooked up for partisan political purposes?

The story of Mary Mapes is classic tragedy. There are two elements that mark the difference between tragedy and melodrama. The first is the main character’s “tragic flaw” which is usually one of the seven deadly sins. In Mapes case, you can take your pick; pride, envy, or anger will do. But it is the second element in tragedy that is the most difficult to achieve for both the playwright and the actor playing the tragic character. And that is the character’s cluelessness regarding why they are suffering this downfall. Look at the great tragic characters in literature and you will see that they go to their deaths without any idea of why their world collapsed around them. In that respect, their sin is always the sin of overweening pride and ambition.

Reaching for the brass ring carries with it the danger that eventually, you’ll fall of the horse. Mape’s fall may have been written in the stars long ago when she ceased being any kind of an impartial journalist and decided to become an advocate. It may have been emotionally satisfying for her to see herself on top of the battlements waving a bloody shirt. But in the end, her belief in her own moral superiority was her achilles heel. How can anyone so good she might have asked herself, be wrong?

The fault, dear Mary, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.