Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column for National Review Online focuses on the truth behind the fables of a new movie.
The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled Truth. But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.
In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his 60 Minutes team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.
The fabulist movie comes on the heels of the Benghazi investigations. An e-mail introduced last month at a House Benghazi committee hearing indicated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — just hours after the attacks on the consulate that left four Americans dead — knew almost immediately that an “al Qaeda-like group” had carried out the killings.
Clinton informed everyone from her own daughter to the Egyptian prime minister that the killings were the work of hard-core terrorists. Yet officially, she knowingly peddled the falsehood that a video maker had caused spontaneous demonstrations that went bad.
Apparently, the truth about Benghazi clashed with the 2012 Barack Obama re-election narrative about the routing of al-Qaeda. For days, Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the president himself likewise sold the fantasy of video-driven killings. …
… Utter disregard for old-fashioned truth is now deeply embedded in contemporary America, largely because it advances a particular agenda. It reminds of an earlier age of politically correct fable, when evidence in the Alger Hiss case and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case got in the way of ideologically useful mythologies.
