We live in a weary age of fable. The latest Hollywood mythology is titled "Truth." But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how corporate and right-wing interests supposedly railroaded CBS News superanchor Dan Rather and his "60 Minutes" producer 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 email 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 Qaida-like group" 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 caused spontaneous demonstrations gone bad.
Apparently, the truth about Benghazi clashed with the 2012 Barack Obama re-election narrative about the routing of al-Qaida. For days, Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the president himself likewise sold the fantasy of video-driven killings.
The Black Lives Matter movement grew out of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. The protestors' signature slogan, "Hands up, don't shoot," evolved from the belief that Brown raised his hands after Wilson fired the first shot and told the officer, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting" in the seconds before his death.
Yet the Justice Department exonerated Wilson, concluding that he shot after Brown struggled with him and then charged toward him. Brown, who allegedly stole cigars from a liquor store before his encounter with Wilson, neither put up his hands to surrender nor was shot in the back while fleeing, according to the DOJ report.
Utter disregard for old-fashioned truth is now deeply embedded in contemporary America, largely because it advances a particular agenda. It reminds one 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.Read the rest of this Victor Davis Hanson op-ed HERE.
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