Yeah, that's basically right but I'm not sure that you're being entirely fair to Bourne.

First, I think under standard definitions of consistent, he does show that an A-theory is consistent with SR (ie. they can both be true at once).

Second, I'm not sure it's fair to say that he is "flying in the face of the central lesson of SR" - he may be flying in the face of the standard way of interpreting this lesson but his claim is precisely that this way of intrepreting the lesson isn't the only way. The lesson can also be interpretted as "no privileged reference frame can be detected."

I agree with the basic anti-Bourne sentiment but wonder whether the wording of your response undermines his claims more than they deserve - I don't think they are inconsistent nor that they fly in the face of the central lesson. I guess I more just think that postulating undetectable physical features of the world in order to make a metaphysical thesis - that is based on intuition (the "present" intuition) that can be explained away - come out to be true is undesirable.

Though it should be noted that Bourne's conclusion is mostly that presentism is the only sensible A-theory but that it's not possible to decide between presentism and a B-theory (that is, he doesn't argue that presentism must be true).

So this is just like the "bodge" I described for general relativity/cosmology, but with even less justification? The preferred foliation has no physical motivation at all, and is plucked entirely out of the aether (so to speak).

I'm not sure I'd count that as consistent with special relativity. Though in principle it would give the same predictions as special relativity.