Junto Boys

ABC and the 9-11 Film

This movie has been compared to the Reagan caricature that CBS was going to broadcast a few years ago that was thwarted due to Republican complaints. But there is a difference that no one has pointed out. The Reagan film angered Republicans because they hold Reagan in esteem. It hurt them not personally or politically. The 9-11 movie is a situation where the biggest critics are the principle players themselves.

Republicans are attacked in these kinds of films so often that they don’t even say boo anymore. What’s the biggest criticism you remember from one of the living members in Oliver Stone’s Nixon? Did you see THE DAY REAGAN WAS SHOT? Alexander Haig was portrayed as a character from 7 DAYS IN MAY. The last Michael Moore movie made Bush and Cheney out to be a couple of bandits. Did either of them ever complain publicly or write letters? Did Karl Rove demand the movie be burned?

Republicans decided a long time ago that they were going to play the natural villains when politics was turned into entertainment. To the Right, it’s just part of the game. To Democrats, any such criticism is tantamount to a fight among players in the same dugout. It’s like Reggie Jackson getting yanked off the field by Billy Martin and the two having a rhubarb on the bench. Remember how Reggie just held his hands up like he couldn’t believe it?

As far as the substance of the argument, the Clinton Administration officials can claim that they got the facts wrong and maybe the filmmakers made some errors, but he said/ she said doesn’t answer the question. The real Clinton defense should be a list of the verifiable actions they took to make the country safer. What we haven’t heard at all in this debate is a list of those actions.

What I think bothers them is not the specific moments that were wrong, the public will forget the details, but a reminder to the country that Democrats didn’t make any proactive stance against terror. Up until the movie, their lack of action hasn’t come into mainstream focus so their generic solutions such as getting better intelligence and re-building our alliances the Bush squandered has played fine as one side of the argument. That’s a law-enforcement strategy and what the movie clearly shows is that strategy in the 1990s led to 9-11. Bush’s slumber only works as a scapegoat if the previous administration had focused on killing evildoers instead of reading them their Miranda rights. And that’s what Democrats hate about the movie. It’s their current campaign strategy on screen and failing miserably.

I have to throw just one quote in for fun.

(Sandy) Berger objected to a scene that he was told showed him refusing to authorize an attack on Osama bin Laden despite the request from CIA officials.

"The fabrication of this scene (of such apparent magnitude) cannot be justified under any reasonable definition of dramatic license," he wrote.

If Berger were so interested in the true story being told, he wouldn’t have stolen top secret documents in his socks and underwear. Because of Berger’s actions you have to assume that he did something pretty bad and letting Osama go would seem a big enough deal that a weasel might try and hide the documents for it. If this is fabricated, then Berger should tell us what lesser thing was so important that he had to cover it up.

Like most things political the movie will blow over and we’ll get back into the comfortable news frames. But this film is a reminder of the special relationship that the Left has with the media and how shocked they were to be a target. It won’t be long before the next Republican is revealed as sub-human and it will no doubt make very little difference to that right-winger.