More than five years after the 2004 election, I still stumble across people in "the reality-based community" saying that "Bush went AWOL", despite the fact that Exhibit A — Dan Rather's Microsoft Word documents from the early 1970s — were shown, beyond any doubt, to be obvious forgeries.

Often there is also an intimation that Bush was trying to get out of service in Vietnam, rather than trying to become a fighter pilot by moving up through the National Guard. Just for the record, from Bernard Goldberg:

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue: the legitimacy of the documents — a very important issue, indeed. But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about — and one that has gone virtually unnoticed. This is it: Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says? The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called "Rathergate" mess says. I recently re-examined the panel's report after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to "Go to page 130." When I did, here's the startling piece of information I found:

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.

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234-page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

I made an online check and discovered that while a few websites noted the CBS finding, the story got no ink (that I could find) on the news pages of any big mainstream paper.

Of course. Doesn't fit the narrative. As with Dan Rather, the truth was utterly unimportant. The amount of pure propaganda (by omission and commission) found in today's news media is truly stunning.