Friday, September 08, 2006

‘The Path to 9/11’ - Makes sense to those without a clue

The progressive activist group Act For Change has sent out a call to bombard ABC for a docudrama they saylays too much blame for 9/11 on Clinton. They hope they can keep it off the air the way conservatives kept the tv movie "The Reagans" off network TV with claims of a liberal bias.


The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley, on the other hand, claims it's
it's not all that bad.


She may be right, I haven't seen it and don't know, but there is one paragraph in her review that makes me think she is oblivious to political realities:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that the sex scandal distracted the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat. But in hindsight, surely the right-wing groups who drove for impeachment must look back at their partisan obsession with shame, like widows sickened by the memory of spats about dirty dishes and gambling debts.


Wanna bet? To this day, right wingers are obsessed with bringing Clinton down. Ms. Stanley may believe there are conservatives going around saying, "oh, we wasted all that time going after Clinton for sexual indiscretions when we should have been fighting terrorism," but I think she would be hard pressed to locate many of them. I think they're all very proud of themselves, and if Ms. Stanley can't see that, how can I trust her ability to judge a politically charged TV movie?


Update: Apparently Ms. Stanley went beyond foolishness in her article. According to Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the 9/11 commission did not, in fact, say Clinton was distracted by Monica-gate. They actually said the opposite. Which, if true, would suggest that Ms. Stanley might have a bit of a bias, although she could just be sloppy.


I mean, that's really pretty bad. I'll admit I've let errors slip into my column. I might, for example, saying such and such a game is the first ever in which you can use a paperclip as a weapon, and then have someone email me to tell me that there was a game in 1988 that did that. It can be hard to catch little stuff like that. But how do you manage to get something as big as a 9/11 report exactly wrong?

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