HULK SMASHED
I got up early for this?
Here we go . . . the Espresso Express is on the move!
If you haven't seen it, olvlz is ripping up Echidne's place. Great essays!
Tucker Carlson was really nasty to David Brock about Media Matters last week; thank God he's on to "Dancing with the Stars" next!
Truthiness!
-
Short thread, that last one, wern't it?
Great stuff by Foser, as usual.
May I just say....FUCK BUSH!!!
Tucker Carlson was really nasty
fucker needs to go freeze some chickens, the spoiled silver-spoon muthafucker!
right-on media-matters, now will any dems take this and run with it?
With a public that still has 30% believing Saddam hussein was incolved in 911, introducing more fictions hardly will increase understanding.
Hey, Molly,
How're the kids? Everyone over that fell disease?
Te Lewinsky thing is so weird: they really can't let it go, can they?
re: the lies. I recall reading that there was a point where they had OBL cornered, but the legal case was not ready. Rather than allow him to get off on trial, they delayed arresting him until they were ready to prosecute, though by that time he'd escaped.
Does this sound familiar to anyone else?
I thought Max Blumenthal's investigation into who is really behind the "Path to 9-11" project was interesting, if it is true. It's none other than David Horowitz and a Christofacsist film production group that want's to destroy American culture. Details of Blumenthal's story are in Huffpost.
From the MM link:
Scholastic, the educational publishing company, has renounced all ties to the film and pulled a discussion guide tied to the movie it had distributed to accompany the film.
For the life of me, I can't understand why an educational publishing company would even consider using a TV movie to educate students about anything.
TV movies are and always have been a joke.
This is nice, from the DMNews;
Islam version of golden rule;
'Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself.'
Shame it is that Swanson's frozen foods should have generated a fortune for some libertarian twit to inhereit.
Diane,
All recovered and getting ready for a heckuva party, thanks!
Will they be stopping the broadcast on Monday at 9 pm Eastern so that Bush can give his 9/11 address and then continue on with the show?
Izzat party today?
All recovered and getting ready for a heckuva party, thanks!
Molly Ivors
Good news!
Party?
According to Carlson's logic, it would be fine for ABC to broadcast a miniseries titled "Tucker Carlson beat his wife" in which an actor portraying a character named "Tucker Carlson," complete with bow tie, beats another actor portraying Mrs. Carlson
The truth is that Tucker looks on and plays with his winkie while other men (usually three at a time)beat and sodomize his wife.
Billy B,
I use video to teach fairly frequently, though documentary film. They're much hipper about complex idea onscreen than they are in text. They would never have read The Corporation, but they watched it.
Not docudrama, however.
Pony Blow is insisting the speech Monday won't be political, that pretty well assures that it will.
It's amazing how much damage you can do in a couple of days with these things. First allusion to Al Gore, who was distracted by the Lewinski thing too.
Morning, all.
Diane, I believe Molly is hosting a Pirate Party.
Will they be stopping the broadcast on Monday at 9 pm Eastern so that Bush can give his 9/11 address and then continue on with the show?
Bush IS part of the show. That becomes ABC’s Nuremburg moment, when Der Furher takes the stage and gives a shout out to all the brownshirts in the audience, after which they get schooled in “How we’ve changed” all for the better these last five years
The boy was born on 9/9/99, which is apparently an incredibly lucky date for the Chinese. Yeah, the party is this afternoon, but SP's making me sit down for a bit.
OK--I made this embarrassing request in the last thread, before being disoriented by new threads.
There's lotsa talk here of way hot lady tennis players. Fine, fine, fine I'm entirely in favor. Any guys?
So just as I finish illustrating the Baghdad story, Atrios wakes up.
Life is so unfair.
Morning Folks
The Company newspaper weighs in:
TELEVISION REVIEW
On Dangerous Ground
ABC's miniseries "The Path to 9/11" makes a hopeless muddle of the line between fact and "dramatization."
By Samantha Bonar
LA Times Staff Writer
September 9, 2006
This review was based upon the version of the miniseries that was made available by ABC in mid-August. The network is still editing the two-part series.
ABC's miniseries "The Path to 9/11" has assigned itself the daunting and dangerous task of explaining how America ended up one bright fall morning with planes crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, causing the deaths of about 3,000 people. Daunting because unraveling that knot is an enormously complex undertaking, a huge challenge to our best scholars and experts. Dangerous because with one false move, viewers could be left with partisan propaganda instead of historical dramatization.
"The Path," which leaves the explaining of these complicated world events to entertainers rather than historians, has many false moves. The two-part series airs Sunday and Monday.
The miniseries, directed by David L. Cunningham ("To End All Wars"), and written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh ("The Day Reagan Was Shot"), opens with Mohamed Atta and his cohorts boarding the planes that would crash into the twin towers, Pentagon and Shanksville, Penn., on Sept. 11, 2001. Then it flashes back to the first attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and introduces us to FBI agent John O'Neill (Harvey Keitel), a tireless expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Part sleuth and part nation's bodyguard, O'Neill is immediately on the case. Keitel, outstanding as always, wins viewers' confidence, perhaps because unconsciously we are relying on him to rewrite history and save us.
With trendy, jerky camera work and a bouncy soundtrack, the five-hour film speed-walks us through smaller attacks that presaged the 9/11 bloodbath: including the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing; the 1998 American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania; the failed 1998 U.S. attempt to assassinate Bin Laden in Afghanistan; the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Despite the best efforts of U.S. security experts to prevent more attacks, history wins and the film ends where it began — at the doomed World Trade Center towers.
The miniseries was a massive undertaking, with close to 250 speaking parts, more than 300 sets and a budget of $40 million. The production values and acting skills cannot be faulted, and of course the topic is compelling. But something strange starts happening around hour three of the miniseries, when the film none-too-subtly suggests that then-President Clinton was too busy dropping his trousers and later struggling not to lose his shirt in impeachment hearings to pay much attention to what was going on in the world, terrorism-wise....
Molly, you'll make it-- and it'll be fun too, with all that piratey goodness about. Arrrrghhhh!
The boy was born on 9/9/99
Hold up! He's going to be . . . SEVEN?!
My god, they grow up right before your eyes.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOUNG THERS!!!
...The film shows real news footage of Clinton's denials of "sexual relations ... with that woman, Monica Lewinsky" in 1998 while O'Neill and other CIA and FBI agents were desperately scrambling to find Bin Laden and thwart more attacks.
And then the partisan politics begin to emerge in the script — big time.
According to "The Path," the Clinton administration was too concerned with such trifles as respecting international laws and treaties, protecting civil liberties, following diplomatic protocol, displaying cultural sensitivity and pursuing larger goals (like Mideast peace) to bring down the bad guys.
At the same time, a fine ribbon of misogyny starts to unwind alongside the wide streak of rah-rah masculine bravado in the film, with just about every woman in authority portrayed as an arrogant witch, from onetime ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine (Patricia Heaton) to Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Shirley Douglas) to Bush's then-national security advisor, now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Penny Johnson Jerald). (The one exception is CIA agent Patricia Carver, played by Amy Madigan, who is prone to outbursts of hysterical tears.) When Ahmed Shah Massoud (played by Mido Hamada), commander of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and a key U.S. ally, demands of U.S. operatives: "Are there any men left in Washington, or are they all cowards?," he means this literally as well as figuratively.
But the main problem with "The Path" is that the interspersing of real news footage with dramatized scenes, a technique employed throughout, makes a hopeless muddle of the line between fact and "dramatization."
Although it claims to be based in part on the 9/11 Commission Report, writer-producer Nowrasteh, a self-described conservative, said in an interview with frontpagemag.com that the report goes back only as far as 1998, and that he did his own research for the years 1993 to 1998.
Yet even if there are not outright lies in the film, as some are claiming — Albright, for one, has called a scene depicting her actions as "false and defamatory" — there are many omissions. Notably, one of the most famous images of Sept. 11, President Bush's frozen response while visiting a Florida classroom when he was told of the attacks, is not depicted.
With a projected TV audience in the millions, "The Path" is an irresponsible film, with its factual distortions wrapped in a really terrific package that lulls viewers into complacency, setting them up for the propaganda that is to follow.
If there is one good thing that will come out of the controversy over ABC's "The Path," it is that it hopefully will make citizens read the 9/11 Commission Report for themselves. After all, a democracy is a terrible thing to waste.
samantha.bonar@latimes.com
Dr Barmpot,
I guess the TV news critics love this thing, but many newspaper critics have savaged it.
I especially like this shot of Jamison's:
Lewinsky was a distraction from issues that matter -- but it was the media, not Clinton administration, that took their eye off the ball
If there is one good thing that will come out of the controversy over ABC's "The Path," it is that it hopefully will make citizens read the 9/11 Commission Report for themselves. After all, a democracy is a terrible thing to waste.
Well, obviously the LA Times hates America.
Round this Samantha person up and send her off to Gitmo STAT!
Roxanne: No they will continue running the film during Bush's speech. It's one of the more boring sections of the film. Just lot of stoopid government meetings in early August 2001 where they discuss and then dismiss National Secutity warnings and cut domestic security funding to zero.
They'll come back in after Bush's speech is done to a really exciting scene where people are leaping out of the burning towers to their death while Bill Clinton is molesting a Girl Scout who came to his house to sell cookies. So we don't miss any of the important Walt Disney corp. history of the events.
So that makes Ken Starr the villain, right?
watertiger, that is amazingly like Ken Lay's attitude toward his employees, but using the wrong finger.
I use video to teach fairly frequently, though documentary film.
I'm glad you're here, MI as you are a teacher. I think using video to instruct is an excellent way to reach (and entertain) students. If the material is entertaining, the students will learn more.
Documentaries are an excellent way to teach, but a TV movie would seem to be a waste of time.
Molly--Not to upset your son's luck, but he's not on the Chinese calendar. How is his forttuitous birthdate lucky to the Chinese?
Yeah but media can also suck. Lets say, good media matters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l...h?
v=lctfUWnlo4I
They'll come back in after Bush's speech is done to a really exciting scene where people are leaping out of the burning towers to their death while Bill Clinton is molesting a Girl Scout who came to his house to sell cookies.
I always forget that part.
There's lotsa talk here of way hot lady tennis players. Fine, fine, fine I'm entirely in favor. Any guys?
Draco | 09.09.06 - 9:41 am | #
I do like Federer; I do not like Roddick.
But, honestly, I much prefer women's tennis, b/c men's tennis is more about raw power than finesse, especially on hard surfaces, such at the US Open.
Also: I hate Martina Hingis b/c she a homophobic asshole.
Draco, in the same way Chinese Customers used to request a tree familiar to them from China be priced at $38.98, which number they considered lucky.
Scholastic has NOT pulled its materials. It put a "critical discussion" and "media awareness" bandaid on them.
The point is that students will STILL be required to watch lies without their teachers having the time to pre-screen the film so they can point them out as part of their so-called "critical discussion."
The point is that the network and those backing this film want future voters to be exposed to these lies because they know that once they sink in they will be that much harder to debunk.
I wonder if J.K. Rowling (whose Harry Potter books Scholastic publishes in this country) knows that the same Christofascists who howled over her novels are backing both this film and Scholastic.
If she does, I wonder what she thinks. And what she'll do.
Wonder if I can get an absentee [paper] ballot since I work in the next town, 10 miles away?
Watching election discussion on CSpan.
Happy birthday Therson.
Molly--Not to upset your son's luck, but he's not on the Chinese calendar. How is his forttuitous birthdate lucky to the Chinese?
9 is a lucky number, and 9/9 was the only day the Emperor would leave the Forbidden City to worship at the temple.
Or so I hear. But my source is pretty smart.
Molly--Of course I wish the best, if that was unclear in my skeptical wishes before. Sorry, as usual
Time for the a.m. walk, altho I hear soccer season noises coming from my local park. Have to go the long way around the fields.
Molly -
Are you and Thers going to be in NYC in Oct? If so, I have a little something for you I will bring along.
I hear soccer season noises coming from my local park. Have to go the long way around the fields.
That's w=here Thers and the 7YO are now.
And SP's full, so I'm back to work. Later, all!
Rorschach,
After our sort of conversation the other night, I remembered this little bit of Langston Hughes. Thought it apropos.
Suicide's Note
The calm, cool face
of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
Rorschach,
After our sort of conversation the other night, I remembered this little bit of Langston Hughes. Thought it apropos.
Suicide's Note
The calm, cool face
of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
"I know there are some scenes where words are put in characters' mouths. But the whole thing is true to the spirit of 9/11."
-- Thomas Kean, Sr.
The spirit of 9/11?!
That certainly deserves a "WTF?!"
Ah, yes, the spirit of 9/11: Fire and smoke and falling bodies and collapsing buildings and stunned fear and grief. Those were the days, eh Thomas?
This isn't zeitgeist or nostalgia, but what purports to be a study of what lead to 9/11 that starts conveniently with the '93 bombing of the WTC.
How about starting with Afgahanistan and our support for Bin Laden, with full--and dismissive--knowledge of his group's ulterior motives towards the West.
How about including the first "war on terror," declared by the Reagan administration?
How about the first Gulf War, that lead to our massive presence in Saudi Arabia, which was one of prime reasons given for the 9/11 attack?
I know, I know: Some facts about imperial hubris are doctrinally unacceptable, and therefore are not part of "history."
9 is a lucky number, and 9/9 was the only day the Emperor would leave the Forbidden City to worship at the temple.
Or so I hear. But my source is pretty smart.
9 is lucky. I can remember years ago someone in Hong Kong spent something like a billion HKDs to get the license plate "9" because of its significance. From what I'd read having a child born on 9/9/99 was a matter of importance for some Chinese, just as having a child born in the year 2000 (the Year of the Dragon) was also important to some.
On the other hand, you want to stay away from 4. “Four” and “death” sound a lot alike in Mandarin. One of the reasons you may not find a 4th floor in some Chinese hotels. (At least none of the ones I was ever in.)
See, all the other comments haven't mattered because they weren't in the Company paper. This one is going to hurt, big time:
REGARDING MEDIA
ABC follows a path to shame
By Tim Rutten
LA Times
September 9, 2006
Surveying the smoking ruin that is ABC's reputation after the "The Path to 9/11" debacle, it's hard to know whether you're looking at the consequence of unadulterated folly or of a calculated strategy that turned out to be too clever by half.
At the end of the day, it probably doesn't make much difference because, either way, the lacerating controversy surrounding the network's docu-dramatic re-creation of events leading to Sept. 11 is an entirely self-inflicted wound. For most of the week, ABC rather haughtily attempted to characterize itself as the victim of philistines, or self-righteously as a champion of free speech or, more pathetically, as just plain misunderstood by people who just don't understand how television is done.
It is none of those things.
It's an opportunistic and self-interested organization that somehow thought it could approach the most wrenching American tragedy since Pearl Harbor with the values that prevail among network television executives — the sort of ad hoc ethics that would make a streetwalker blush — and that nobody would mind.
That part of this whole shabby sequence of events is the hardest to fathom. It's well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they're basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters' names. You simply appropriate the names of real people, then make them do whatever attention-getting thing fills the allotted time.
But did the people who run ABC Entertainment — the network division directly responsible for this mess — really believe that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger would watch themselves on television doing and saying thing they never did or said and not object? When these fictional incidents were portrayed as contributing to the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people, did they think that the former Clinton administration officials and others so caricatured simply would shrug and say, "Well, that's dramatic license for you?" Did they really expect anyone to accept the preposterous notion that — as some at the network argued this week — the film's facts were wrong, but its "essence" was true? These people really need to get out more....
Feral,
Economically it's a bit rough, but yes, I think we'll make it. Is the Mrs coming?
...What's easier to understand is what ABC thought it was up to with its marketing of "The Path to 9/11" and why it thought a successful marketing campaign might lead our politically polarized nation to feverishly overlook the network's irresponsibility toward history. After all, why should the many thousands of Americans still grieving for loved ones lost five years ago care about an accurate account of the governmental decisions that may have contributed to those deaths when they could get a good dose of "essence"?
Over the past weeks, the network flooded the country with advance copies of its film. Some sources put the number of DVDs in circulation at 900. An ABC spokeswoman, who demanded to be "off the record" said Friday that she couldn't confirm 900 copies, but that the number "certainly was more than 500." She promised to e-mail back an accurate count; she never did. Many of those copies were directed at right-wing talk show hosts and, some, to Republican bloggers, who long have argued that — however complacent the Bush administration may initially been concerning radical Islamic terrorism — Clinton and his people overlooked far more signs of Al Qaeda's lethality for a far longer period of time. These commentators were delighted to see that ABC's docu-dramatic version of events supported their view. So, for weeks they've been talking the film up on their radio programs and analyzing its merits on their blogs. ABC, in other words, appeared to have replicated the marketing triumph Mel Gibson scored by screening "The Passion of the Christ" to selected evangelical Christian audiences inclined to be sympathetic.
If ABC had had Gibson's manic discipline — about marketing, at least — it might have succeeded. However, with that many copies in circulation, interested Democrats and former Clinton administration officials soon saw the movie and began picking its ludicrous inaccuracies apart in protests to ABC and — more important — directly to Robert Iger, the chief executive of Disney, the network's parent company. By Friday, even the film's star, Harvey Keitel, was telling an interviewer: "You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected." ...
...So ABC began re-editing a film that already had been scrutinized by hundreds of people with long memories and access to publication. Democrats remained skeptical that any version of the film could be made credible; GOP partisans were angry and some said they felt used. Most were disgusted with what they deemed Disney/ABC's cowardice in the face of Democratic criticism. As conservative columnist Mark Steyn put it on one talk show: ABC "supposedly spent years working on it to get it absolutely right, to get the absolute truth, and then they're frantically staying up late the night before it broadcasts snipping out 10 minutes here and there, because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger and various other Clinton apparatchiks object to this or that line here and there. I mean, that makes them look pathetic, it makes ABC, I think, look ridiculous, in fact, because there's hundreds of these tapes out there. People are going to know exactly what lines were cut and what weren't cut."
One of the most unfortunate consequences of all this was that most of the news media completely overlook a stunning affront to 1st Amendment freedoms that occurred when the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate sent Iger a letter Thursday appearing to threaten the network's licenses unless "The Path to 9/11" was altered or killed:
"The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest ... ," the lawmakers wrote. "We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program."
We've all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it's divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats — but this was a thuggish new low. If we were inclined to dramatic license, the guys with thick necks in "On the Waterfront" would come to mind, though it's doubtful even Harvey Keitel could plausibly play Harry Reid as threatening.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
So young Thers is now 7. I know it will be a great party.
yes, I think we'll make it. Is the Mrs coming?
Excellent! (Tents fingers). I'll be solo, she can't get the time off. I'm taking a week and a half for roadtripping and visits on the way. Do you have any ideas as to where I could park my car for a few days? I'm planning on leaving it somewhere on the outskirts and using public transport while in the city.
DWD | Homepage | 09.09.06 - 9:52 am | #
Very nice, DWD! Love Langston Hughes.
Do you have any ideas as to where I could park my car for a few days?
Yeah; let me see what I can do.
Why is it "thuggish" to remind ABC that they ae contractually obligated to act in the public interest?
Yeah; let me see what I can do.
Great, Thanks! Have a great day and Happy, Happy to young Thers. BTW, I'll be spending a couple of days in Mich on my way back to see our Miss Vicki. Sounds like she's getting a micro Eschacon going for that weekend.
Why is it "thuggish" to remind ABC that they ae contractually obligated to act in the public interest?
Molly Ivors
Molly - it's a Company town. That's the Company part coming out.
However - all the rest? Nobody involved is ever going to eat lunch in that town again.
I would imagine the corporate lawyers at ABC/Disney are working over-time this weekend.
While a successful defamation suit might be difficult to win, that doesn't mean it can't be filed.
On the bright side, I take this to be last gasp of the "make your own reality" folks. Every morning another suicide bomber, every afternoon another IED. Even Karl isn't trying to tell us anymore that US efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not failing.
So rather than trying to spin their disasters, they're looking for someone else to blame. Not particularly original, or responsible. But we are talking about right wing authoritarian bedwetters. All that Karl has left to feed the base is Clinton's penis.
"Nine prominent historians have asked ABC to cancel the broadcast."
And STILL ABC refused?!
I'm sorry, I've enjoyed the acquaintence of a few prominent historians in my day but never imagined for a minute that an army of them could stop a juggernaught like Disney.
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