NYC Letter: Pants On Fire IX

Day 220 of CHOPE

Five-alarm Conflagration Edition.

The liberal press that pretends to journalism has its infatuations* around which it re-fashions facts and gushes its goo-goo-eyed commentary. The unabashed liberal press goes one better and simply lies. [Pause.] Outright knowingly lies. Case in point -- Rathergate. [We stare at the wall.] Vicious lies.

A “LOST” FACT IN THE “RATHERGATE” MESS

August 25th, 2009 (bernardgoldberg.com) - [J]ust 55 days before a very close presidential election, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes put a story on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes that brought on the media equivalent of World War III.

... The story was about how the young George Bush got preferential treatment during the Vietnam War; how he wangled his way into the Texas Air National Guard back in the 1960s to avoid service in Vietnam; and how he was able to do it because his father was a big-shot, a United States Congressman from Houston. The story portrayed the Bush as a slacker. Others have said it portrayed him as a “cowardly draft dodger.”

And to bolster their story, Rather and Mapes got their hands on “never-before-seen” documents (as Rather put it in his story) that supposedly backed up their months (and in Mapes’ case, years) of reporting.

... Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says. I recently re-examined the panel’s report [scil., The Thornburgh-Boccardi Report] after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to “Go to page 130.”** When I did, here’s the startling piece of information I found:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

[Emphasis in the original.]

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air comments:

[Mapes' reporting] goes beyond being hoaxed by Bill Burkett and the mythical “Lucy Ramirez” and running a story with no corroboration. It indicts Mapes and by extension Rather (who apparently couldn’t be bothered to check on the documents or story on his own) in a plot to deliberately conduct a character assassination from a broadcast booth, in an explicit attempt to manipulate an election.

Truth will out.

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* Hard-hitting hagiography, and this and this and this and this.

** Page 140 in the linked PDF.