I won’t say that Rathergate was a low point for the so-called news media — I think that they perigeed, if not cratered in, in last year’s campaign’s non-stop fellation of the Obama machine, but it was pretty bad. But up until now, it was possible, just barely, to generously assume that Mapes (and Dan Rather) were merely hyperpartisan idiots. Now, however, it seems that they (or at least she — perhaps he remains a mere idiot) were lying:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

But that didn’t fit the narrative, so it had to be tossed out. And of course, they will still be heralded as brave martyrs, in their brave attempts to speak truth to the power of the Evil Rovian Right-Wing propaganda machine, and there will continue to be insufficient curiosity among their former colleagues to exhume the matter any further.

And there is, of course, nothing to logically preclude us from believing that she remains a moron as well as a deceptive slanderer. In fact, the evidence for both is pretty compelling.