Hey, remember that stupid, incredibly ham-handed, and only-an-drooling-idiot-would-fall-for-it Rathergate scandal? Well, in case you were a teenager in 2004 and missed it…
:pause: God preserve us, it really was a decade ago, huh? I didn’t have kids then. I wasn’t married, then. Shoot, I was still smoking.
…anyway: CBS got a bunch of documents purporting to show that George W Bush went AWOL from the Texas National Guard and that people covered it up, because shut up you Republicans. Dan Rather (remember him?) promptly ran with the story, because if the documents were true it’d have been a bombshell. Only problem was that these documents were fakes: they were originally written in Microsoft Word 2003 and then made to look like documents from the 1970s*. Once this was pointed out CBS ended up giving Rather (and, importantly for this article, his producer Mary Mapes) the bum’s rush. Continue reading In which we revisit Rathergate, and the bad movie about to be made of it.