So who I they going to get to play Buckhead?
Nobody.This is a fantasy film, after all - and facing the reality that it takes willful ignorance to fail to see that the memos are frauds would be a downer. The whole point of the slick, professional movie will be that Rather was speaking truth to power. Buckhead didnt have, and didnt need power to tell the obvious truth. What are we going to counter it with? None so blind as those who will not see.
Our problem is that Democrats know it all, and will not listen to contradictory truth. Kids today - people under the age of thirty - have no hands-on experience with a 1973-era typewriter. FReepers either have that experience, or are willing to learn from those who do. We might as well start a list of all the things we know to be true, but which will not be mentioned by Robert Dan Rather Redford. Ill start with the obvious:The fundamental problem in fighting this revisionism is that it is very hard to preach to the non-converted. You have to make people want to listen. Given that Obama is in pretty bad odor by now, it should be possible to get an audience for the proposition that there was no need for Killian to even want Bush to retain his flying status at the time the memos purport to have been written.
- Killian didnt type the memos" - or anything else. Fighter pilots of the era were far too sexist to stoop to that kind of work even if he had wanted those memos typed.
- Killian had no motive to protect himself by writing memos which confess to illegality, which those memos do.
- Killians secretary said she didnt type those memos either.
- In fact, there is a black hole where the chain of custody for those memos should be if they were to be taken seriously. They just appear in Burketts hands out of nowhere, but they do not purport to be originals but many generations of degradation copies of copies of copies. As if a copy of the original had gotten into the wild, and copies of that had been passed around and copied again, and again, and again. Of course, in such case these memos would have been learned of by Texas Democrats when Bush was running for governor the first time, never mind during his gubernatorial reelection campaign or Bushs first run for the presidency. Thus, the quality of the copies cannot, and will not, be an issue in the movie. Redford will be a dead ringer for Rather compared to the casting of what the moviegoer will see purporting to represent the actual Burkett memos. Thus, the notorious th which in the Burkett memo extends above the height which a dedicated th key can strike will be represented by a th which is not a true superscript. If indeed the memos appear at all. Which I seriously doubt. They will dismiss the superscript problem by simply showing a typewriter with a th key in the keyboard, and make that seem dispositive. Nice and simple.
Killian didnt need Lt. Bush in flight status at TANG for the simple reason that the Air Force was drawing down its assets from Vietnam, and many combat-veteran pilots were available to fill TANG flying billets for which earlier (when Bush enlisted) it had been difficult to get enough qualified recruits. This, at a time when the plane Bush was trained up in was about to be phased out.
I would say that it matters relatively little who plays Rather in this agitprop movie. The star of the show will play (an utterly fictional version of) Killian.