Back in September 2004, blogger Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs helped defuse an explosive allegation from Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II -- that then-President George W. Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War -- by pointing out the embarrassing fact that documents obtained by Rather to prove the claim were written in Microsoft Word font that wasn't invented until decades after Bush served in the military.
The bias-driven blunder, one of many uncovered by Johnson, Power Line and Free Republic, resulted in CBS firing Rather's producer, Mary Mapes, and three other employees, with Rather making an unceremonious departure from anchor work on the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes II shortly after.
In an attempt to salvage her reputation, Mapes wrote a book in 2005 titled "Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power." A decade later, Hollywood decided to make a movie from her tale, casting Robert Redford as Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mapes.
This past Thursday, Oct. 8, Redford and Blanchett were interviewed in a public forum sponsored by the New York Times and Mapes made a dubious claim that caught Limbaugh's attention --
LIMBAUGH: Anyway, I mentioned at the top of the program that Mary Mapes and Dan Rather and that whole episode with the forged documents and the phony story about George W. Bush and the National Guard, there's a movie that has been made that tries to say that Dan Rather got railroaded, that he and Mary Mapes were right on the money, that the story was accurate and that CBS fell in with big corporate interests and decided it was better to be in bed with the president of the United States than to support their own anchor, i.e., Dan Rather. So they found somebody to go out and make a movie of this and even CBS has come out and denounced the movie as a bunch of fiction which it is!
But they convinced Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett to star in this thing which is history revisionism and it's actually based on Mary Mapes' biography. Mary Mapes fell in with this guy named Bill Burkett, a genuine loony-tune. Bill Burkett claimed that he had memos, signed memos and all kinds of paperwork from the commanding officer of the National Guard when Bush was there, claiming that Bush never showed up, that Bush never made an appearance, that Bush didn't fly, did it only to get out of serving in Vietnam. And so Rather and Mapes put this story on 60 Minutes, they ran with it, and it turned out that the people at Powerline, the guys over at Powerline blog, totally exposed the documents as 100 percent forgeries. And it was a giant investigation and CBS found out about it and summarily canned Dan Rather and Mary Mapes.
So Mary Mapes writes her biography about this in an attempt to hold onto her reputation and somehow I end up in this biography, six times, minor references.
But it was what Mapes claimed last week that got Limbaugh wondering if she is misleading the public yet again --
LIMBAUGH: But last Thursday in New York, the New York Times hosted a TimesTalk(s) conversation with the actress Cate Blanchett, the actor Robert Redford, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes to discuss the new movie Truth about this scandal that happened in 2004. Susan Dominus (reporter for New York Times) is the moderator. She said, Mary, when you watched the movie starring Cate Blanchett as you, did you immediately know that it had to be a lie? (pause for effect). No, I made that up, folks. She didn't, actually. But if I were Mary Mapes and they had Cate Blanchett play me, I would know they're lying. But anyway, that's just an aside.
Here's the real question from Susan Dominus -- Mary, when you watch the movie, was there anything that either made you cringe personally, like, that was painful to relive that, that moment, or obviously there were some very intimate emotional scenes involving, you know, your, well maybe you could talk a little bit about your family life that, you know, Cate portrays in the movie, like, you know, the scene with your father.
MAPES (speaking at the TimesTalks forum): One of the sort of subtexts in the movie is this cascading series of events that, where everything is just raining down and every time I turned around or Dan turned around there was something new and newly hideous happening to us. I have an estranged father and we had not had contact for many years but a right-wing radio show got in touch with my father and talked to him about his relationship with me and then suddenly I'm driving down the road and there's my father on Rush Limbaugh talking about me, about how I always had a radical feminist agenda, you know, s**t, you haven't talked to me for 15 years, how can you even know?! But that was the level of personal attack and personal pain.
LIMBAUGH: I don't know, Mary, maybe it was a wild guess that you had a radical feminist agenda given that you do.
Over the next few days, Limbaugh searched through his show's archives and discovered that Mapes' claim was as bogus as her crusading journalism on Bush's military service --
LIMBAUGH: Well anyway, she's running all over saying that her dad was on this show, I mean, driving around the road, listening to Rush Limbaugh and there's my father on Rush Limbaugh, talking about me. We went back, over the weekend, we went back and we searched the archives. You know, every word I have ever uttered has been preserved at the archives.of RushLimbaugh.com. Not every word searchable yet, 'cause we hold some of it back, obviously. Every word that I have uttered is there. So we began an exhaustive and extensive search. Now what in the world was she talking about, 'cause I don't remember her dad being on this show. Do you remember her dad being on this show, 2004? No, he didn't call in, that's not what happened. Here is this is all I ever said about it and, in fact, this was at 1:55 p.m. on Sept. 21st, 2004, the last 20 seconds, last 30 seconds before the break, I'm heading into the top of the hour break, and this is what I said, this is what she claims, driving around listening on the radio, this is what she heard --
LIMBAUGH, 9/21/04: All right, that's it for the second hour of the EIB Network, one hour to go, we'll get back to the latest at CBS and Dan Rather, Mary Mapes. Did you hear what her father said about her on the radio yesterday, that she's gone crazy with liberalism and that she got into journalism to advance a radical feminist agenda. Her father's in Seattle and like 70-some odd years old. Her stepmother said he shouldn't speak of her that way. We'll be back in just a second.
Back to Limbaugh's commentary on Monday --
LIMBAUGH: That was it. That was it. So she apparently heard that but she thinks that her father appeared on the program. Now I'm not trying to -- her father was on the radio somewhere which is what I heard about and I think I know where her father was. I think her father was on with John Carlson out in Seattle. I think that's who found her father is John Carlson. And that would have been, well, it was 2004 and I heard about that, that's what I was referencing here. But she's driving around and listening to Rush Limbaugh and imagines hearing her father.
You know, these liberals can't take people saying things about them they think are untrue. Now here's a woman who has engaged in a total fabricated, made-up story about George W. Bush. She and Dan Rather have used and accepted forged documents from a genuinely questionably all-there figure, a guy named Bill Burkett. I mean, they have no problem doing a phony story containing forged documents, promulgating a lie that George W. Bush never went to the National Guard just to get out of the service in Vietnam and never did his required service at the Guard. They've got no problem putting that story out, none whatsoever, lying through their teeth about it! And then let her hear that her father describes her as, she about has a cow! These people literally cannot stand, either they can't stand when people tell the truth about 'em and they certainly don't know how to deal with it when people make stuff up about 'em. But man oh man, do they know how to lie about people. They were trying to destroy Bush's presidency. They were trying to affect the outcome of the 2004 election. This is September, folks, they're trying to elect John Kerry here!
John Carlson, Johnny Carson, Rush Limbaugh, what-ever. But hey, close enough for CBS, at least back when Rather and Mapes worked there.
If Mapes' claim is accurate, it should not be difficult for her to prove. Until, of course, she has to provide, uh, documentation.
