Monday, August 28, 2006

It must be nice to be able to blame everyone else for your failings

...and to have a huge assortment of toadies ready to put the meme that you aren't responsible for ANY of your fuckups out there for the world to see.

This rave for an upcoming ABC miniseries about 9/11 comes from a so-called conservative:

This is the first Hollywood production I’ve seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama Bin Laden. One astonishing sequence in "The Path to 9/11" shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan. They're on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead. They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they'll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization. That way, their necks will be on the line - and not his. The astonished CIA agent on the ground in Afghanistan repeatedly asks Berger if this is really what the administration wants. Berger refuses to answer, and then finally just hangs up on the agent. The CIA team and the Northern Alliance, just a few feet from capturing Bin Laden, have to abandon the entire mission. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda shortly thereafter bomb the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing over 225 men, women, and children, and wounding over 4000. The episode is a perfect example of Clinton-era irresponsibility and incompetence.

The miniseries also has a scene in which the CIA has crucial information identifying some of the 9/11 hijackers in advance of 9/11, but refuses to share the information with the FBI because of the “wall” put up by certain Democrat officials to prevent information sharing between government agencies. The CIA is depicted as sitting in a meeting with the FBI (with John O’Neil present), and showing the FBI surveillance photos of terrorism suspects - some of whom will later turn out to be the 9/11 hijackers. The CIA asks the FBI for help in identifying the men in the photos, but refuses to give the FBI any of the information they have on who the men are. John O’Neil protests that it’s impossible for the FBI to help the CIA identify the men if they won’t provide any information whatsoever on them. When O’Neil tells the FBI to keep the photos so they can at least work on them, the CIA becomes hostile to O’Neil and takes the photos back. Tragically, John O’Neil himself will later die in the 9/11 attacks, in part because agencies like the CIA refused to share crucial information like this. Scenes like these really challenge the prevailing liberal media and Hollywood mindset by showing that the Patriot Act's information-sharing and surveillance provisions are crucial to the safety of this country, and that political correctness and bureaucratic inefficiency are Islamic terrorism’s greatest friend.


You know, as I recall, back in the late 1990's, when Bill Clinton was trying mightily to address the threat presented by Osama Bin Laden, the Republicans and their little lapdog Joe Lieberman were too busy trying to throw him out of office because of a blowjob (oh spare me the "It's not the sex, it's the lying bullshit; we all know that this bunch thinks lies are perfectly acceptable when it's THEIR guy lying about things more important than trying to hide a tawdry sexual liaison) to allow him to do what needed to be done. Bill Clinton wasn't their guy, and they tried for eight years to destroy him -- whatever the cost. And we now see what that cost was.

But the corporate-owned ABC network, pledged to protect and defend George W. Bush at all costs, is perfectly willing to pick up Bush's baton that the 9/11 attacks were the fault of both his own father and Bill Clinton, rather than face the fact that their little sock puppet may have destroyed their gravy train with his incompetence.

I'm not sure that even Lost is worth supporting this bunch.

Best. Campaign. Video. Ever.





If the song sounds like Squirrel Nut Zippers' Put a Lid on it, it's because the song was written by ex-SNZ's Tom Maxwell and Ken Mosher, who perform it, along with Rickie Lee Jones. The campaign of Coleen Rowley (yes, THAT Coleen Rowley, who alerted the FBI about Zacarias Moussaoui and was ignored), who is running for Congress in Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District against the John Kline pictured, put together the video.

More here.


(via Atrios)