That Fudge & Nougat Thing Is Kinda Odd

Jonah Goldberg on old media with references to the obscure and forgotten:

A quick refresher in world history. Prior to World War I, the world was a huge ball of molten slag and gaseous muck. But that's not important right now. Immediately prior to World War I, the world was divvied up into huge power blocs, basically known as empires. The rulers, bureaucrats, aristocrats, intellectuals, and guys in funny wigs running these empires refused to accept that their way of life was unsustainable, that the curtain was closing on their chapter under the sun ("Jonah Goldberg doesn't merely mix metaphors, he snaps their spines!" — self-blurb). A relatively unknown loser (no offense to the PowerLine guys, Freep, et al.) shot Arch Duke Ferdinand and the whole house of cards came down. Some empires were obliged to help their allies. Others were just greedy, seeing opportunities in others' weakness. The point — which doesn't warrant extremely close inspection — is that the giants seemed extremely powerful right until they fell over. Moreover, what caused them to fall over was their desire to prove that they were as strong as they used to be, that they were still the Engines of History, Masters of their Fates, and the Inspiration of Needlessly Ornate Furniture.
Something similar is going on with the Media Empires of today. Powerline or the blogosphere generally — which would be the "Black Hand" in this analogy — spotted the now-obvious fraudulent nature of these documents immediately. The charge is the journalistic equivalent of an assassin's bullet for Dan Rather. Had he refused to go to war in defense of these documents, he might have survived. Instead he's determined to go the way of the Hapsburgs and his career is over.
Oh sure, he'll probably ride out this election and retire in the next couple years with crates full of gold watches, plaques, awards, and attaboys from the establishment media. But the inevitable fact is that he will be drawn into a war he cannot win. The very best he can do is defend the slender possibility that these documents could be real. At this point it seems impossible that he can prove they are real. Indeed, Rather has already largely conceded all this. His defenses are all about how you can't prove the documents are false, as if the burden of proof for a journalistic icon is for other people to prove what he says is wrong rather than for him to prove it is right.
And, for Rather, this kind of draw is a loss. This could drag on for days or weeks or months. But even if it's days, the bleeding will be fatal. Already, the man looks like a sad buffoon, in denial that the quicksand is already up to his chest. His flailing about "partisan operatives" being behind the backlash makes him sound like the Norma Desmond of Big Journalism. Someone tell me when ABC News and the Washington Post become arms of the RNC, because I would love to see that memo. But before I believed it, I'd study the size of the "th"s a bit more closely than Dan did.

Maybe I'm showing my youth but I had to Google Norma Desmond.