Revisionism Revisited

I feel like Mortimer's article put an entirely new spin on whether or not one should accept what is traditionally accepted as "the past" and past events. At first when I began his piece about the comment made by Bush I thought he was just being bitter about the general opinion of revisionist historians. He drones on and on about how revisionists deserve more respect and how valuable their work is, but I feel that this may be biased due to his own profession as a historian and perhaps himself feels that by writing this article, he himself will gain respect. I feel as though in the beginning of the article, Mortimer takes personal offense to the quote by George W. Bush in which he casts revisionist historians in a negative light. After this passage it seems that Mortimer is set off in a flurry of counterpoints defending what revisionist historians do and why they are so very important. He brings up American examples of revised history such as the stories of George Washington and the cherry tree and JFK's assassination to try and convince readers that most of history has been revised at some point for infinite benefits to society. I can agree that as more facts and information are discovered about a mysterious past event that the story should be slightly altered to represent the truth, but not constantly revised to the point of people having personal opinions about past events and wanting to incorporate their own spin or conspiracy theory to the actual entry in encyclopedias. Major alterations to records that misrepresent the truth seem to be beneficial but constant minor alterations that try to make the event seem favorable or less favorable to readers is just abuse of revisionism. That's my final judgment on the argument he poses but that's my reaction to the points he presented and I understood. I feel like I would have to be a revisionist historian myself to fully understand what it was he was trying to argue exactly.