Friday - September 08, 2006

Mini-series Ignites Firestorm On Left

Did Bill Clinton ignore the whole building storm in the Middle East? Was he distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Did Democrats in the Senate and House spend too much time enjoying their majority to pay attention to the first attack on the WTC in the early 90’s? What in heck was ABC thinking when they decided to create a mini-series to look at these facts?

Most of us already knew what a lying horn-dog Bill Clinton was and how the only real wars he fought during his presidency were in Waco, Texas against a religious cult and in south Florida over Elian Gonzalez. Not to mention the cluster f**k that took place in Yugoslavia. So why is everyone surprised that this is being made into a TV series?

The long and short of it is that Slick Willie Clinton is having a hissy fit over the movie. That is not surprising since his only real concern these days is his “legacy”. Madeline Albright is up in arms, claiming it is a total falsification. Even the NY Times had to weigh in with a story that repeats over and over that it is only a fictional dramatization, i.e. not to be believed.

Finally, and most tellingly, the Senate Democratic leadership has urged ABC to cancel showing the mini-series, even going so far as to threaten to cancel Disney’s broadcast license (Disney owns ABC) unless the show is cancelled. The most ridiculous reaction of all is coming from the blogosphere. The DailyKOS leftards are having a conniption fit, which probably was to be expected (thanks to LGF for the tip).

Kinda makes you wonder what all these Donks and Liberals are so afraid of, don’t it? Could it be the story is too close to the truth? Do the Liberal sheep need to be told that their leaders in the Democratic party let all this happen long before Bush came into office? It will come as a surprise to most of them and they probably won’t believe it. The rest of us already knew better ....

ABC Terrorism Drama Stirs Controversy
_{NEW YORK (AP) - September 8, 2006}

“The Path to 9/11” will break your heart. It will leave you unnerved, even more than before. And angrier than ever. A five-hour miniseries that dramatizes a decade’s worth of events leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, this film is plenty gripping. It doesn’t forgo artistry for polemics.

Even so, it drives home, step by step, a message any viewer can understand: The people in charge of keeping you safe failed the nation monumentally. Systemically. Shamefully. And continue to, five years after what should have been a terribly sufficient wake-up call.

Then “The Path to 9/11” leaves the viewer with a chilling coda: a recap of the “report card” issued last December by the 9/11 Commission, which accused the government of failing to protect the nation against another attack, and assigned failing grades in five areas, with a dozen Ds and just one A (actually, A-minus).

That might be the more valuable focus of your concern as clashing voices from the blogosphere embrace or decry “The Path to 9/11” as a right-wing portrayal that slams President Clinton more than George W. Bush.

Airing commercial-free on ABC Sunday and Monday at 8 p.m. EDT (with a 9/11-related followup from ABC News at 10 p.m. Monday), the miniseries claims to draw from a number of sources, including the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission, which was established to investigate government missteps that led to the attacks.

The scope of “The Path to 9/11” is vast, with 247 speaking roles, a $40 million budget and more than 300 sets (including a seven-story-high base of the World Trade Center), according to the director, David Cunningham ("To End All Wars"), who said he shot 550 hours of film for the project.

If the miniseries has a star, it’s Harvey Keitel. He plays FBI counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill, whose dogged efforts to contain the al-Qaida threat were rebuffed by those above him, and who, upon retiring at age 49 to be director of security for the World Trade Center, died two weeks later at the hands of the people he had worked so hard to defeat.

Other familiar actors include Patricia Heaton as Barbara Bodine, Ambassador to Yemen; Donnie Wahlberg as a key undercover CIA agent, and Penny Johnson Jerald ("24") as Condoleezza Rice.

Playing Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar to four presidents, Stephen Root ("News Radio") gets one of the film’s most stirring speeches during a high-level meeting in Washington. Referring to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 that killed six, he declares, “We have to imagine ourselves on a future day when we have failed to act and hundreds of Americans lay dead. We have to do something now.”

But “no” and “that’s the best we can do” are all-too-typical replies heard in the film when anyone proposes heightened efforts. In a posting on ThinkProgress.org this week, Clarke disputed another scene that had Clinton officials refusing to give the go-ahead to American agents in Afghanistan who were in position to capture Osama bin Laden - then abruptly hanging up the phone on them.

It’s a shocking occurrence. Presumably Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, will have a chance to reiterate his argument that it never happened when he appears Monday on ABC News’ “9/11/06: Where Things Stand.”

Perhaps another guest, Thomas Kean (the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who was chairman of the 9/11 Commission and served as senior consultant for “The Path to 9/11") will defend the film’s evenhandedness. Never mind how talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has interpreted the film for his listeners as demonstrating that, in the Clinton era, “we didn’t do diddly-squat,” while the Bush administration was subsequently “caught up and sort of hamstrung by the existing procedures” and “hasn’t had a chance to change them.”

ABC responded to the brewing controversy Tuesday only by saying that its miniseries is “a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources, including the 9/11 Commission report, other published materials and from personal interviews.”

The statement also noted how the events that led to 9/11 “originally sparked great debate, so it’s not surprising that a movie surrounding those events has revived the debate.” But is this really debate, or does it verge on the partisan infighting that routinely disregards the vital issues themselves?

- More on the story here ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 09/08/2006 at 01:01 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
• Comments (15) • Trackbacks(1)  Permalink •  

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