The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. And what a tired affair it was.

There’s no pride in watching the deconstruction of a man. You can take all your conservative pundits who rode down the warpaths of perceived biased and mute them forever now. You can take your navel-gazing journalists who believe Rather made A Big Mistake He Must Pay For and put them in a room, where their own self importance will choke them all to death. And you can take your CBS backstabbers who found in Rather’s last hours of weakness a chance to rise up and join the chorus of haters—becoming smaller themselves as the time of his career suicide drew near—and give them all a great big prize for bravery.

And yes, that includes Walter Cronkite.

Take them all away. Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. Bravo, you threw stones at a 74-year-old careerist. You whispered sad stories about a weird man to a press corps all too willing to take him out. Dan Rather, who was by most accounts ambitious, polarizing, determined, a self-promoter, a tireless worker, a man who believed in his own ideals, a square peg in the proverbial round hole, the replacement for a myth, a flawed arbiter of history, a man less smooth than his peers and, lastly, a man complicit in a story that may have been inaccurate but not entirely wrong, is no longer the Dan Rather we knew …

And now his time is over—not merely part of an era ended, as when Brokaw retired, but a tortured anti-hero paying the price for indiscretions few can even remember.

UPDATE: And now that Dan's history, it's on to more fertile territory, in which a new and potentially embarrassing account of Saddam's capture is debunked in detail by the technically savvy and first-handedly familiar before the news media even have time to put together their front-page treatments of it. SomethingAwful is mentioned.

UPDATE: Oh yes—and as Steve W. mentions, couldn't Rather have saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply firing up Word on his own computer (assuming he has such a device) and trying to reproduce the Killian documents on his own? If he has any conversance whatsoever with the basic modern tools of journalism, that little experiment ought to tell him all he ever needed to know.