You fools..I've already pre-purchased my ticket for the opening day...
Posted on 10/01/2015 8:22:53 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
The classic definition of chutzpah — the guy who murders his parents and then begs for mercy because he’s an orphan — gets a rewrite with “Truth,” a movie insisting forged documents are real.
Robert Redford, making no effort to look or sound like Dan Rather, plays the CBS newsman ruined after he presented obviously forged documents about George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service.
It was September 2004, two months before Bush was to be re-elected in a race against John Kerry, and Rather producer Mary Mapes is desperate for a scoop.
Researchers sent out to find information damaging to Bush contact everyone in the chain of command during Bush’s National Guard days. (In one unintentionally revealing moment, co-written and directed by The Amazing Spider-Man's James Vanderbilt, Mapes is shown watching a Swift Boat Veteran TV commercial, showing a complete lack of interest in their stories.)
Mapes found squirrely retired National Guard colonel Bill Burkett, who gave her photocopied memos purportedly showing Bush had been AWOL, and whose font and spacing perfectly matched default settings on a 21st-century Microsoft Word program.
Two of CBS’s own document experts raised doubts about them. Bush hater Burkett agreed to hand over the documents on condition that Mapes put him in touch with the John Kerry campaign, which he wanted to assist. Mapes and Rather ran with the story anyway, defending it for days.
“Truth” is based on Mapes’ memoir, “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power.” Mapes, who hasn’t worked in TV news since the scandal, and Rather insist to this day they were right, and Rather even sued CBS for breach of contract. The lawsuit was laughed out of court — in much the same way that “Truth” will be laughed out of theaters.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Blanchett-as-Mapes does a Sorkinesque heroic-liberal soliloquy, lecturing investigators and spitting out what the producers and writer hope will become iconic aphorisms.
As with all leftists, they believe that after lying, cheating and stealing they should be applauded as higher forms of beings.
PS - Mapes looked 60 years old at age 35. God knows what she looks like now but demonic possession is very draining.
“Fake but accurate.”
Liberal fantasy worlds operate like Stalin’s Soviet Union. People and facts disappear and are replaced with fabrications that then are distributed to newspapers, books, films, and official history. Bodyguards of Lies to advance the Left’s agenda.
“Truth” makes it appear that the documents’ contents were verified by a senior officer in Bush’s unit, Gen. Bobby Hodges. Mapes is seen reading the documents over the phone to him, and Hodges agrees that they accurately reflected the mindset of Bush’s late commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, whose signature is on the documents.
That, in reality, did not happen — at least according to Hodges: He was not told that the accuracy of the documents was in dispute, and essentially said, “If Killian wrote that, that’s what he felt,” noted Megan McArdle (an Obama voter) in an analysis of the case on Bloomberg View.
Hodges took extensive notes of the interview at the time, and some of the things Mapes would claim they discussed did not turn up in his version of the chat. (In the movie, Hodges is later shown objecting to being described in the media as Mapes’ trump card — but doesn’t deny having provided backing to Mapes’ story.)
In the film’s most climactic scene, Blanchett is forced to explain herself to a CBS-appointed fact-finding committee headed by Dick Thornburgh, who had served as attorney general under the first President Bush. She gives an impassioned defense of her work in a speech meant to make the audience stand up and cheer — but instead comes across as obtuse to the point of being self-delusional.
Blanchett’s Mapes tells the committee that the documents had to be genuine because they contain military acronyms and jargon and show knowledge of Bush’s military service (which had been extensively covered in the media). It beggars belief, she claims, that anyone could go through so much trouble and then produce fake documents using Microsoft Word.
She even insists she’s been persecuted for her political leanings (though she won’t admit to any): “You mean, am I now or have I ever been a liberal?” she asks the committee.
At one point she declares, “Our story was about whether the president fulfilled his service. Nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about fonts and forgeries, and they hope to God the truth gets lost in the scrum!”
Except Mapes couldn’t prove the president went AWOL without the documents.
Eight people, including Mapes, Rather and three CBS execs, lost their jobs over the scandal. As Kevin Drum wrote in Washington Monthly after the committee report was released, “It’s a train wreck. A complete disaster. You have to read the whole report to get the full flavor, but the nickel version is simple: It’s unbelievable that this ‘60 Minutes’ segment ever got on the air.”
Another climactic moment near the end comes when Topher Grace’s researcher character, having been fired by CBS, gives a similarly long and angry speech about how CBS and its then-corporate owner Viacom are simply doing the handiwork of its allies in the Bush administration because of Viacom’s interests involving FCC rules.
That speech is equally nutty: It raises the question of why CBS would have allowed the story — or any other anti-Bush stories — to run in the first place. Mapes won a Peabody for her reporting that same year on the Abu Ghraib scandal.
For postmodernist libtards, it is the narrative that matters, not truth
Out of all the excellent technical analysis on this site that helped uncover that hoax, the one that convinced me the most quickly, and enabled me to convince even my most liberal friends, was a guy who said just open a new document in MS Word and don’t change any settings. Type the letter and only hit return at the end of a paragraph. Compare. He then posted a gif showing this result alternating with the CBS news website posted copy of the “document”. It was a 100% perfect match. After that, anyone who has any doubt about the fact that this was a blatant hoax is not even worth discussing, let alone debating.
Lefties aren’t too bright.
What was the same guy’s analysis of Obama’s “birth certificate” ?
You fools..I've already pre-purchased my ticket for the opening day...
There is no need to review the technical evidence about the memos, except to note that 1970s-era typewriters lacked word processing features such as superscripts, kerning (adjusting the spaces between letters to improve readability), proportional spacing and mathematically centered titles. A detailed account of the scandal, which became famous as “RatherGate,” can be found here.
To many, the debunking of the 60 Minutes segment For the Record was a brilliantly effective exercise in free speech that prevented a slanted hit piece from influencing a national election. But to Mapes and Rather, it was a profound injustice.
Dan Rather’s Revenge and the Battle for Free Speech
PJ Media ^ | October 17, 2014 | Scott Swett
Posted on 10/17/2014, 2:13:09 PM by Interesting Times
“Eight people, including Mapes, Rather and three CBS execs, lost their jobs over the scandal.”
Sometimes the good guys win one : )
f any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it. So far, there is none.
— CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather
Is that Dan Blather or you in the photo?
Unfortunately all true.
For the Orwellian left the “truth” is created by having the last longest lie.... intellectual honesty does not apply....its a long term form of “shouting down” others across time and history
Did this movie go straight to DVD? Was it for DNC consumption? I was awol a couple of times, it didn’t stop me from succeeding in my career. All I got was a no weekend pass and restriction to quarters. However the XO slipped me my pass when the CO left for the weekend. OMG, if I ran as a Republican and the DNC found that out, I’d never win the election. LOL. So simple minded news people, how did they ever get those jobs? No one ever brings up the fact that Nixon cut short the NG obligation or the fact that ETs could be performed at any other Guard Unit for attendance purposes, if they are not within their units home station. There is also make up drills, where a member can report to his unit on a day not listed as a drill date. Too make a movie out of this and eliminating the real facts just makes it a propaganda film for dupes.
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