This week's New York brings Joe Hagan's second story this year about a wretched CBS News anchor, his first being that interminable cover piece on Katie Couric this summer. Today's slightly less endless article chronicles Hagan's talks with Dan Rather. Hagan doesn't uncover anything you don't already know about Rather's legal dispute with CBS or the documents scandal that started it all. He does, however, paint Rather as an around-the-bend loony toon, one of those old guys who madly scribbles notes to himself while muttering at the pigeons from his park bench.

Well, okay, there aren't any actual pigeons in the story, but the interview is conducted on a Central Park bench in November, and the anchor's madly-scribbled notes to himself do make a nuttyish appearance. One of Rather's friends describes him as "crazed" during the network's investigation of his story; Hagan says the anchor, who hired his own private eye to check the story out, was often heard saying "I used to be Dan Rather." Toss in some classic Ratherese, like "Look, I don't want to be some Don Quixote out here tilting at windmills, without even a Sancho," and "It stenches of fix," and Rather's got schizo hobo geek all sewn up. Sigh. The world seemed like a far safer place when we didn't know how bent the voice of God actually was.