Daily Inspiration Quote by Dan Rather

Dan Rather is trying to do three things at once here: hedge, accuse, and keep his hands technically clean. The line starts in the careful language of a newsroom lawyered-up by experience: "They may have... But again maybe not". That double back-and-forth is not verbal clutter; it performs restraint. It signals that the speaker knows the rules of evidence, knows the audience is primed for conspiracy talk, and refuses to hand over a clean, declarative charge.

Then he detonates the metaphor: "that's like if a frog had side pockets he'd probably wear a handgun". It is folksy in the way Rather often is, but its function is surgical. He is mocking a counterfactual as so unmoored from reality that it collapses into cartoon logic. The humor is disarming, but the cynicism lands: once you start building an argument on "if not for X", you're free-associating, not reporting.

The context is the Clinton-era scandal ecosystem, where the Paula Jones case was both a specific allegation and a gateway drug to a broader prosecutorial and media frenzy. Rather's subtext is that the machinery of investigation and political appetite might have found another pretext; or it might not have. The key move is refusing to sanctify inevitability. His intent isn't to defend Clinton or vindicate Starr so much as to puncture the comforting myth that history had one obvious track. The frog image is Rather's way of policing narrative laziness with a laugh that still bites.