Dan Rather's 70 Million Little Pieces

Dan Rather offered up his best James Frey impression on Larry King Live last night, with King reading the part of Oprah Winfrey.

Over and over again, Rather, on the air to discuss his $70 million lawsuit against CBS, defended his controversial report on George Bush's military service, insisting it was accurate even though the documents it was based on could never be authenticated.

"It wasn't a fraud. The facts of the story were true," he told King. "Nobody to this day has shown the reports were fraudulent. The facts of the story and the truth of the story stands up to this day."

The comparison to Frey -- who continued to tout the "emotional truth" of A Million Little Pieces long after it emerged that the book's anecdotes were made up -- is unavoidable. Frey's defense was weak because his book would have gone unpublished and unread had it not been packaged as non-fiction.

Likewise, there was no serious dispute over Bush's performance in the Texas Air National Guard at the time of Rather's report. Indeed, the outlines of the story were so well known that Bush's own spokesman simply dismissed the documents as old news when asked about them. Rather knows that the real point of his broadcast was the first-hand evidence, not the underlying "facts of the story." And whether or not the documents are genuine, the account of how cursorily they were vetted was hugely damaging to CBS News's credibility.

Rather's presence seemed to arouse the usually-somnolent King, who engaged in some unusually tough questioning. At one point, he aired a clip of an earlier interview with Rather discussing his hasty departure from the anchor chair post-Memogate. "I'm not a victim of anything," 2005 Rather averred.

"You said you weren't anyone's victim," King pointed out.

"But I've learned, since 2005, I've learned a good deal," he claimed, using as a for-example an anecdote about Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone's support of Bush.

He had a harder time explaining away his on-air apology for the National Guard report, which King also replayed. "Does your lawsuit belie that [apology]?" King demanded.

"No, but it puts it in context," Rather said. "First of all, that was about the documents, not about the truth of what was reported....I played team. I'm accountable for that."

But, he added, "I said it. I meant it at the time and I mean it now."

No, Dan. You don't.

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