Back to Bush

Four decades [after Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman starred in a movie about 'Deep Throat' journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein], Redford has returned, in a sense to close out that era [...]. Redford plays Dan Rather in a new film, “Truth,” about the September 8, 2004 “60 Minutes II” report on George W. Bush’s dodgy record in the Texas Air National Guard, which effectively ended Rather’s career at CBS, after he and producer Mary Mapes were unable to prove the authenticity of six memos which played a central role in their report.

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Rather’s career with CBS was ended because he built his story on apparently fraudulent memos — their actual status remains undetermined — from Lt. Colonel. Jerry B. Killian. The most notable one, labeled “CYA” for “cover your ass,” claimed Killian was being pressured from above to give Bush undeserved better marks in his yearly evaluation. However, shortly after the original airing, Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, placed the memos’ status in an almost exact parallel to Woodward and Bernstein’s false reporting of an underlying true fact. “I didn’t type them,” Knox said in a broadcast interview, “However, the information in those is correct.”

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Indeed, the gaps in Bush’s service record were undeniable. They were reported, but virtually ignored four years earlier, in the 2000 election cycle.

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[T]hree [...] analyses reached similar conclusions, without any reliance on the “60 Minutes” memos.

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he memos were clearly important for “60 Minutes” as a scoop, but they were hardly essential for disproving Bush’s claims that he had met his military obligations, or that his honorable discharge closed the book on the story.. The documentary record alone already disproved these claims conclusively. As the Globe reported:

”He [Bush] broke his contract with the United States government — without any adverse consequences. And the Texas Air National Guard was complicit in allowing this to happen,” Lechliter said in an interview yesterday. ”He was a pilot. It cost the government a million dollars to train him to fly. So he should have been held to an even higher standard.”

Again, this can’t be stressed enough: the controversial memos that Rather and Mapes relied on were just part of a much larger mosaic. Take them away, and the larger mosaic still remains, with all of its other damning details.

And yet … “The CBS story, and the furor that caused, buried the story so deeply that you couldn’t possibly disinter it in 2004.”

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This does not mean that Rather and Mapes were right. We still don’t know that and we probably never will. But it does mean that the first wave of criticism from rightwing blogs — the criticism that stopped the story in its tracks — was wrong, based on false assumptions.

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The facts be damned, it was just too discordant to have the Democratic candidate be the war hero, and the Republican candidate be the deserter. And so the facts themselves had to be changed to fit the cultural narrative. That is exactly what happened.

  Salon

And CBS has announced it will not place any ads for the new movie. Which probably makes it more likely that more people will want to see it, so probably not a good move on their part.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.