It's hard to fathom why a movie about Rathergate — with Robert Redford as Dan Rather — is being made.

Years ago, Redford played the role of another newsman, Bob Woodward, in "All the President's Men," the story of 2 dogged journalists who were wildly successful. They brought down a President and sparked an American love affair with "investigative journalism." What's become of that today? Maybe this new movie will seriously address what has happened to the profession that Bob Woodward (and his partner Carl Bernstein) made us see as heroic and centered on truth-seeking. In Rathergate, a once-illustrious network, centered on ruining a presidential candidate, faked a document.

The movie will be called "Truth." Ironically? I doubt it. "Truth" is a shortened form of "Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power," the memoir written by Mary Mapes, the CBS producer who lost her job over Rathergate. From the Amazon reviews of the book (to which I've added an explanatory link):

If the liars behind this failed attempt to get Kerry elected had just used an old typewriter it would have worked and the press may have been able to steal an election. Just think about that. Now there's going to be a movie based on this book?

Well, now... think about it. Mapes is going to be played by a great actress, Cate Blanchette. Conceivably, the Shakespearean complexities of the role will emerge. I'm picturing a grand, slow, torturous descent. Tragedy!

A typewriter! a typewriter! my network for a typewriter!

That's unlikely. And should there be a whole big motion picture made from this story when the ultimate motion picture of Rathergate has already been made? It is the tiniest possible picture in motion:

"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke."

Sang Bob Dylan in "All Along the Watchtower," which I'm quoting because today's theme on the blog is tragedy and comedy and because I'm reading this NYT piece by Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) about how it's conceivable — not that conceivable — that Bob Dylan could win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience. His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.

Just this morning — a propos of what I won't say — we were talking about examples of individuals who gain an audience and then see their self-expression reflected in how that audience understands them, and they reject their own expression because they don't like how it looks. Who has done that? I thought first of Dave Chappelle, and Meade thought of the Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson. I came up with another name that doesn't really fit the category — Saint Paul — and Meade said Bob Dylan.

This week — that terrible week for liberals — seems like a good time for a big NYT Magazine article on the "Right-Wing Flame War!" started by Charles Johnson.

As I've already said, Little Green Footballs is a blog that always repelled me. It felt hateful and extreme. But I've been aware that it flipped and became about calling other people hateful and extreme. So I took the trouble to read the story in the NYT. It's pretty weird:

IN OCTOBER 2007, Johnson was asked to take part in what was billed as a Counter-Jihad Conference in Brussels, a gathering of fewer than a hundred politicians and opinion leaders from around the world who convened to share ideas and strategies for combating the spread of militant Islam. Johnson was not the only writer invited — Geller was there, as well as Robert Spencer of jihadwatch.org (a Web site Johnson himself designed), to name two — but he did not go. “I’m just not a joiner of these things,” he says.

The conference finished up in Brussels, and “the next day,” Johnson remembers, “people were e-mailing me saying, ‘You might want to cover this.’ So I started looking into it.” He discovered that among the conference’s 90 or so participants — though not among the speakers — was a man named Filip Dewinter, a leader of a Belgian-nationalist political party called Vlaams Belang, or “Flemish Interest.” Vlaams Belang, which has a history that reaches back to the wrong side of World War II, has an unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness of all sorts; a few years ago, for example, the party announced an advertising campaign in Moroccan newspapers and magazines to “discourage foreigners from coming to our country.” And as recently as 2004, it was condemned by the Belgian Supreme Court for incitement to discrimination and racial segregation. (The party responded by changing its name.) Even to most right-wing sensibilities, Vlaams Belang is certainly beyond the pale. Still, whether or not Dewinter, who has said that “in Flanders, the multicultural society has led to a multicriminal society,” is more extreme than the commenters who appeared regularly on Little Green Footballs seems like a subject on which right-wing minds might reasonably disagree. Perhaps that still happens somewhere. Gray, however, is not a popular shade on the Internet.

It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives, should become the issue over which a kind of civil war among American conservatives broke out, but that is what happened.

So Belgium got to him?! Here's this guy who somehow can't go to a conference, and then he fixates on somebody in the audience at a conference, and then makes all kinds of connections from there. Well, there's something very strange about the mind of Charles Johnson. Does it mean anything more generally about right-leaning people on the web? Does the NYT want it to?

UPDATE: Charles Johnson noticed this post and responded:

A very ignorant post from someone who knows nothing about it. I make no apologies for wanting to distance myself from European fascist groups -- and there is no doubt that they wanted to get me on their side at one point.

The expression "I make no apologies" would only make sense if I had somehow criticized him for wanting to distance himself from European fascist groups, which I didn't do. I just puzzled over how his mind put together the problem that he needed to take action about. I make no apologies for not knowing anything more about it than I could read in the New York Times... or for finding the old Little Green Footballs too hateful to want to read.

Althouse is clueless, yet her mouth still runs.

This kind of bullshit insult doesn't make me want to do any more research about Johnson. I read a NYT article about him and wrote a short post about it. If there is some mysterious backstory that's missing from the NYT, why not tell me about it? I'm not a useless, ignorant person because I don't know it, whatever it is. Why lash out like this? I'm sticking with my original impression that he's got too much free-floating anger. Toxic.

UPDATE 2: "I was one of the organizers of the Brussels event, and I was the person who wrote to Charles Johnson to invite him... Filip Dewinter was indeed a speaker at the conference... [T]o assert that there is some 'guilt by association' with Filip Dewinter is to give credence to the idea that the Vlaams Belang leader deserves the 'fascist' smears that have been so frequently aimed at him." I have no background or opinion on this myself. I'm linking to that for what it's worth and out of a sense of fairness.

Do we need to try to understand Charles Johnson?

"[Johnson's] explanation is a little thin. It’s more an illustration of how he’s flipped out, from right to left. But apparently it works like this: If you disagree with any element of half of the American body politic, you disagree with the whole thing. This makes you saner, more compassionate, more embracing of diversity. Probably smarter, too. And if you agree with any element of half the American body politic, you agree with the whole thing, and you are a crazy hater. But the whole thing is crazy and hateful...."

Personally, I don't need to go through the exercise of figuring out what happened to Johnson. I've avoided him all these years because he seemed too extreme and hateful. Now, he's fired up about other people being extreme and hateful? And he's fired up in a way that seems extreme and hateful? I do not need to go there. That was never my scene.