Dan Rather still doesn’t get it.

Rather spoke Monday at Fordham University School of Law in Manhatten and, with lips-a-quivering and eyes-a-watering, said that “there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career.”

Spare us the phony tears, Dan.

The fear in the newsroom is that you guys no longer have a stranglehold on what gets out to the American people. Remember those forged documents, Dan? I played an early role of proving that your unimpeachable source, Bill Burkett, was as loony as Cindy Sheehan after 3 fingers of Wild Turkey. You said that there is a “new journalism order” out there. You’re dang right and you had better get used to it. We’re riding your elitist butts like a duck on a June bug and we’re not going to tolerate the continuation of advocacy journalism. Your job is to report the facts, not to sway public opinion. These little hit pieces like Wayne Slater continues to write for the Dallas Morning News don’t have a place in the “new journalism order.” Neither do people like you. If you create a story out of whole cloth to damage those you don’t like or if you refuse to report a story that might hurt your political buddies, then we’re going to hold you accountable for it.

[HBO Documentary and Family president Sheila] Nevins asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.

“No, I do not,” Rather said. That’s not to say there weren’t forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.

Dan evidently thinks that forces in the Bush administration are repressing him. Repressing you from what, Dan? Making up stories and reporting them as fact? Danny-boy, you just don’t understand that it was your beyond-the-pale partisan bias and advocacy journalism that got you in trouble with the American people, not with anyone in the Bush administration. In fact, if I were Karl Rove I would hate to see you go because you so epitomize what is wrong with the mainstream media.

Hey, Dan — you report, we decide, and if we don’t like your reporting, we’re going to do it for you.