I have acquired from an “unimpeachable source” the partial introduction to the Memogate report. I share it now with all of you:

We, The Hon. Richard Thornburgh and Slightly Less than Honorable Louis Boccardi, would like to thank the Viacom Board of Directors for dusting us off and making us useful. We also would like to take this opportunity to thank CBS President Leslie Moonves and a cross-dresser who calls himself “Voltron”.

The scope of this report is to investigate how and where CBS screwed the pooch in airing forged documents. It also will examine why the hell this operation trusts Dan Rather, despite his well-known affinity for eccentric behavior, which includes but is not limited to, contrived Texas sayings (”This neck-and-neck election tingles like a set of earmuffs made from two interconnected rabid armadillos in estrus”, etc.), high-priced Russian escorts, and a diet of peyote buttons and Absinthe chasers.

From our numerous interviews, tarot card readings and consultations with the Magic Eight Ball toy that Mary Mapes used to determine the memos’ authenticity, we have concluded the following:

* The journalism and ethics of Rather and Mapes is comparable to watching a monkey screwing a football — no matter how one looks at it, it’s just plain wrong.

* Mapes never questioned Bill Burkett as to how documents supposedly written in 1972 and 1973 could have been written on “Pokemon” stationery. Mapes erred when she bought Burkett’s story that he was a time-traveler from planet Grothnor who provided Lt. Col. Jerry Killian with said parchment. Furthermore, Mapes failed to ask Burkett questions only a Grothnorian could answer, such as the size of his time machine or the center fielder for the Grothnor Red Sox.

* The CBS News ethics manual should never have been used to prop up the pool table in News President Andrew Heyward’s office.

* Staff had numerous opportunities to replace Rather in the years following his 1980 Afghanistan head injury in which he was viciously bitch-slapped by a mullah. Management repeatedly ignored co-worker warnings, such as the time Rather stripped naked in the CBS Commissary, covered himself in chocolate pudding and claimed he was Napoleon Bonaparte (see p. 27).

* Memogate is the latest in a long history of fabricated sources by Mapes. We called Abu Ghraib prison in an attempt to locate atrocity witnesses I.P. Freeley, Seymour Butts and Hugh Jass, but the staff duty officer said no such soliders are stationed there.

*A “climate of fear” prevented co-workers from coming forward, as did Mapes’ authority to give complaining staffers the bastinado, as did the staff’s desire not to see her in the dominatrix outfit Heyward bought her for Christmas that December holiday the mainstream press forbids us from mentioning.

* Despite our best efforts, we cannot determine the frequency, Kenneth.

I look forward to the rest of the report, which I anticipate receiving this evening. The Kinko’s in Abilene, Texas, is open until 10 p.m.