One of the toughest lessons any journalist has to learn is that if you have no facts to back up your story, you have no story.

In the post-Watergate era of "deepthroats" and "anonymous sources," a lot of lazy reportage slips by the wayside, these days. A lot of people figure that you wouldn't be saying something if it wasn't true, and take it at face value. But, all the same, it still behooves reporters to make sure they've got their facts all lined up in a row in case someone starts asking questions.

And this goes double when your story is calling someone's background, ethics or truth into question. There is no feeling worse than the one you get when you shoot your mouth off about someone, and then discover your facts were false. It is no fun - no fun at all.

I've had that happen to me, before, and been called on it rather harshly - and deservedly so. In that sense, I can kind of understand what Dan Rather, and CBS, are going through in the wake of Memo-Gate.

I say "kind of" because my moment of error was only ever a local embarrassment, rather than international. I only ever libeled my high school, rather than my President. (And I could have staved it all off by including the word "supposedly" in there, too.)

But it's the same, nasty feeling, no matter the scale: all the trust in your person, and the worth of your words, are turned inside out like a jellyfish caught in an outboard propeller. People wonder if you've been taking the piss all along, and start to consider you a liability rather than an asset. They all start going through your back catalog to see if you had any other "mistakes" in there. And you live in constant fear of a "private word" with the editor...

Like I said - no fun at all.

The best thing for anyone who's been caught on the short end of that stick to do is to own up to having made a mistake as loudly as that mistake was made. Make what apologies you can, and whatever restitution you must. And then go lay low for a little while, and avoid making any more big revelations until the scandal's had a chance to blow over.

So you would think that a seasoned, nigh-veteran journalist like Dan Rather would have already started laying low. But he's not: instead, he's staying the course. And he is insisting that the story is true, even if the facts that support that story are turning out to not be true.

How can that be? He says that there is an underlying, "fundamental truth" at work here. In other words, even if the memo was a completely bogus fabrication, the core accusation it was used to support - that President Bush was shirking his duties - is true. It's just that they haven't found the proof, after all. At least, not yet...

Is the accusation true? Who knows? There's some degree of suspicion as to what happened when, or what didn't, but I doubt we're going to find a "smoking gun" either way after all this time. Life just doesn't tend to work like that, unfortunately.

But that's not stopping Mr. Rather from sticking to his guns on this one. If anything, it seems to be making him hold on all the more: desperately clinging to the vain, vague hope that sooner or later, this story will be vindicated.

Now, I wouldn't even try to discount the importance of fundamental truth. I suspect a lot of investigations are spurned from the notion that so-and-so did it, or so-and-so didn't do it, or such-and-such was a lie, or whatever other permutations there could be in such matters. Sometimes you just get that growling hunch in your gut that something is connected to something else, and you need to go prove it, if only to yourself.

But when it comes to adjudicating such matters, you still need to the facts in place to see something done about that fundamental truth. Otherwise, even the most important truth in the world no better than a well-told lie. And this goes both in legal matters and in journalism: it isn't enough to keep saying it's the truth until the truth pokes its head out of the crowd and says "Yes! It is true! And God bless you, sir!"

No. You have to prove it. And if your proof is proven wrong, you have to apologize and try to go make it right.

In that sense, this whole song and dance from Dan Rather isn't really about standing up for fundamental truth. It's a case of shifting the goalposts. He won't own up to the fact that his "facts" were not factual, and is instead saying that there couldn't be that much smoke without a fire.

It smacks of someone throwing a well-heeled tantrum, and is highly unprofessional. I think Mr. Rather should be ashamed of himself for carrying on like this. I figure CBS already is...

But we shouldn't forget that he's not the only one who's been doing some goalpost-shifting of late.

Turn your Wayback machines back in time to more than a year ago, when we were gearing up for a war against Saddam Hussein. You'll remember how we were told that his regime had stockpiles of WMDs? How he had mobile weapons labs churning them out? And how he could use those WMDs against us within 15 minutes or less?

But now, after more than a year of searching, talking to scientists and everyone who may have been involved in Saddam's weapons programs, a report has concluded that Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of WMDs. In fact, he really didn't have any at all, anymore, except for a few small quantities his people were trying to milk for assassination purposes.

That lack of big guns wasn't from a lack of trying, of course: the intent was there, and if he'd had a chance to get his hands on usable materials, we could have had a real problem. But what was important in our presentations - both to the American people and the world at large - was that he had both the intent to harm and the means to do it. And we were told that, with both intent and means in his hands, waiting was no longer an option.

So I'm wondering when President Bush - having been caught on the short end of the truth stick - is going to really own up to having made a mistake. If not, I suggest we all take the time this November to help him go lay low for a little while...