Protesting Too Much

This whole ABC movie thing is odiferous. It strikes me that the Dems are protesting just a touch to loudly. Or maybe they are protesting far too loudly. The "veiled" threats against ABC don't strike me as a reasonable level of protest. Not to mention that so much of the party has jumped on the condemnation bandwagon.

The Democratic National Committee delivered to the network a petition with more than 200,000 names that demanded withdrawal of the film, which the petition called "right-wing propaganda."

Officials of the committee said they would continue to collect and deliver signatures until ABC "does the right thing and pulls this scandalous project."

Senator John Kerry and Al Gore, Mr. Clinton's vice president, also released statements castigating ABC.

And

At least before any late editing, the five-hour film depicts some Clinton administration officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Samuel R. Berger, national security adviser, as placing obstacles in the way of strikes against Osama bin Laden.

Both Ms. Albright and Mr. Berger have called such depictions a fabrication.

One particular target of Democratic anger is Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission that Congress created to investigate the events leading to the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Kean was a senior consultant to the mini-series, and in a strongly worded letter to him dated yesterday, Ms. Albright and Mr. Berger expressed "deep dismay" that he had played such a role.

"Actors portraying us do contemptible things we never did, and say things we neither said nor believed," the letter read. "What's more, in many instances these portrayals are contradicted by your commission's own findings."

I suppose Albright may have a complaint, but that leaves a lot of doubt about the amount of history that Berger stole out of the archives in his pants. Though the sentence blaming the Actors is actually fairly amusing. Like an actor can have an original thought.

You have to love the quote that the NYTimes chose from a conservative blog.

But the debate was not entirely one-sided. Among a variety of conservative Web sites that accused Democrats of politicizing Sept. 11 was that of Conservative Voice.

"Former President William Jefferson Clinton and his minions are strong-arming the folks at ABC Television," a commentary on that site said, "in order to stop a docudrama being aired during the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The Clintonistas are conducting a full-court press to prevent Americans from learning the truth."

Ok, say it with me, Docudrama. This isn't truth. And this is why I think the concept of Docudrama is so incredibly moronic. You can't mix documentary and drama. All that is created is a major smudging of the public's understanding of reality. The MSM is already managing a fantastic job of smudging reality, I don't see why there would be any need to have another catalyst to such a distortion of reality.

This Fox report has some interesting points on Clinton's management of his history.

If the worst criticism of President Bush is that he lied to us about Iraq, then we just got a whopping reminder of Bill Clinton's extraordinary talents for deception.

In a letter to ABC's chief Bob Iger, Clinton's attorney, Bruce Lindsey, alleges that the network's program, The Path to 9/11 is "factually and incontrovertibly" inaccurate in suggesting that the Clinton administration let Usama bin Laden slip through its fingers. Clinton's defenders, from their high horses, arrogantly have demand that the program be edited to their satisfaction, or be pulled entirely.

Bristling at evidence that Clinton and his administration were wavering and indecisive, the letter asserted that the president aggressively tried to "take a shot at Bin Laden." It cites the 9/11 Commission Report for supposedly giving credit to Clinton for approving "every request made of him by the CIA and the U.S. military involving using force against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

This is close enough to the truth to make the "I-didn't-inhale" and "I-didn't-have-sex-with-that-woman" Clinton think he can get away with it. But it is far enough away from the truth to be classified as, if not a bold lie, an artless equivocation.

As usual, Clinton figures that the rest of us are too stupid or lazy to look it up for ourselves. And having read the complete report when it came out more than two years ago, I think it is an inescapable fact that a vacillating, equivocating administration had more than one opportunity to take out terrorist mastermind bin Laden, but blew it.

Of course it's a partisan statement, but then, it does make a certain level of sense. The final line condemnation may be harsh, but it's closer to reality than Clinton's posture of having done everything to restrain the terrorist threats. It also bothers me that the MSM in most cases allows Clinton's contention as to what really happened go unchallenged. Fox does slap him down periodically, but they are a rarity and they are partisan, so they are discounted completely by a very large sector of the country.

Well, I'm sure the end result will be edited right to pieces. No doubt ABC will completely cave to the political censorship demanded by the Dems.