If anyone is keeping abreast of Dan Rather's $70 million lawsuit against CBS, you'd know that recently there was a firestorm of previously non-public information that was just shitted upon the media by Rather's attorneys. It includes internal memos, documents, and transcripts that went down during Memogate in 2004, when 60 Minutes put some documents up about George Bush's military service in the Air Force that later turned out to be forgeries.

So that's a lot of stuff to wade through, but what's turned up so far is the revelation that the "independent panel" CBS was forming to review Memogate — and how the Bush story aired on CBS without being thoroughly fact-checked — wasn't so much "independent" as it was "slanted to the right by ridiculous levels." You know, so they could adequately defend themselves from right-y criticism regarding their findings that, hey, maybe CBS was in the clear.

Except, maybe CBS just wanted to insulate itself before throwing Dan Rather under the bus by staffing up on some very conservative names to make up the panel?

On, September 22, CBS announced that the independent panel would be comprised of two individuals: Former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, and Louis Boccardi, the former head of The Associated Press.
A]s is clear from the deposition testimony, because of the perception that CBS News and Dan Rather had a liberal bias, CBS purposefully chose a Republican lawyer, not for any nefarious purpose, but to open itself up to its harshest conservative critics and to ensure that the Panel’s findings would be found credible.

Okay, so these this Republican lawyer was chosen because Dan Rather was a liberal. Fine. But you know who else was on the short list?

* William Buckley
* Robert Novak
* Kate O’Beirne
* Nicholas Von Hoffman
* Tucker Carlson
* Pat Buchanan
* George Will
* Lou Dobbs
* Matt Drudge
* Robert Barkley
* Robert Kagan
* Fred Barnes
* William Kristol
* John Podhoretz
* David Brooks
* William Safire
* Bernard Goldberg
* Ann Coulter
* Andrew Sullivan
* Christopher Hitchens
* PJ O’Rourke
* Christopher Caldwell
* Elliot Abrams
* Charles Krauthammer
* William Bennett
* Rush Limbaugh

At the very bottom of the list, someone wrote in one more name. "Roger Ailes."

To be fair, perhaps CBS was just trying to get all those worst people in the same room together and lock the door. The panel would be comprised of anyone who was alive after three days.