2006-09-07

The Path to 9-11

Does anybody else get the feeling that if Clinton had spent as much effort in wiping out terrorism as he has in trying to get a re-edit of the ABC miniseries, that the twin towers would still be standing?

UPDATE 9 SEP; I, for some unknown reason, am going to make an attempt to see this from the Democrat side. I will counter-argue the Democrat side immediately, so I don't know how effective an advocate I will be, but what the heck, let's go.

Democrats are saying that the miniseries will not be an accurate depiction of what really happened. This is, unfortunately, correct. The Path to 9-11 is a movie, and though based on the 9-11 commission report it is still just a movie. The producers have admitted that they have condensed and combined scenes and characters and have, for the sake of the drama, put words in people's mouths that had not actually come out of them before.

Is this sufficient reason to pull the miniseries off the air? I would have to answer that with a resounding "No!" I am sorry, Mr. Clinton, and the DNC, but I think that the citizens of the US are sophisticated enough to realize that even the "true life" entertainment that they watch isn't really what happened. I think that the Democrats are just bringing ridicule upon themselves for acting so petulantly on the matter, especially when they can presumably point to other bits of the movie that might show that Republicans in embarassing circumstances.

I don't think that most critics have seen the movie, but I have seen Tom Kean (by the way, that is pronounced "cane" as in sugar or walking, not "keen" as in razor or peachy), the chairman of the 9-11 Commission, attest to the general veracity of the film. So, what is truly my take on the film? I will probably watch it, because I am not really that interested in the Manning Bowl, but I am not going to delude myself into thinking that anything that the characters in the movie say are actual quotes of the historic figures the characters represent. I will know that the film is probably about 95% true to history, but since I didn't do any additional research into the subject, I don't know which 5% isn't true, so I will have to take the whole thing as speculation. I will think that the events depicted are all possibly what occured, but I will not think of anything on screen as carved in stone "HISTORY". Who knows, it might motivate me to actually peruse the 9-11 Commission report and other source materials to figure out for myself what really went on.

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