I'd like to take this opportunity to wish a fond farewell to CBS news anchor Dan Rather on his recent retirement. Even though it's lights out, Katie bar the door, say your prayers Aunt Ethel for Dan's career, his place in journalistic history is assured. Whether digging for the truth on Watergate like a West Virginia coalminer on a meth binge or reporting from Vietnam where danger was thicker than molasses on an old woman's dentures, Dan Rather has been an institution in America's media universe for half a century. Without Dan Rather's familiar presence, the 6:30 nightly news will seem emptier than a pig roast in Tel Aviv. While Rather's critics have been madder than a drowning hen with epilepsy over the Bush National Guard controversy, even the most ardent naysayer would admit that Dan Rather will cast a shadow like a buzzard picking out a hobo's eyes on the highway at high noon. When Dan Rather spoke, you could print it, go with it, take it to the bank, yell it while running down the street, write it on post-it notes and slap it on your cubicle, use it as the tenets of a new religion. Dan Rather's career proved the wisdom of that old Texas adage, "You can take a bag of chicken livers to the old barn dance, but don't ever slap your grandmother on washing day without a permit from City Hall." Dan Rather will be missed like an old whore's lost innocence.