Still More Swill From ABC

And you're right.
I haven't written word one about The Reagans and that controversy on this thread. However, both were bad. What I do know is that this POS ran on ABC and The Reagans didn't run on CBS. What I do know is that this POS ran under the flasg of Disney which ran away from Fahrenheit 9/11. Pardon me if I don't see the equivalence in the outcomes.

UPDATE -- Rumor has it that Part Deux has Bush and Cheney ordering Flight 93 to be shot down, which we all know from the latest release of the air-traffic tapes is absolutely not the case.
All the mistakes, omissions, blatant bullshit runs in exactly the same direction. Hmm...

 

Damn, you're a busy boy. How are you going to make that ticker-tape parade? You better get some mango posthaste ;-)

ABC's "editing" consisted of meatball surgery, pure and simple. Putting in the "disclaimer" repeatedly. Nothing of substance, which meant the scene of Sandy Berger calling off the "hit" on OBL -- which anyone with a brain (sorry Rush) knows didn't happen -- stayed put.

What's not debatable is both administrations properly deserve blame in different forms for what happened. It's also not debatable that the administration in power from 1993 to 2001 actually TRIED to get OBL and was dissuaded (repeatedly) by a Republican-dominated Congress bent on going Joe McCarthy regarding a consensual sexual act.

 

Tonight's the one dedicated to the Bush administration. No Crawford vacation. No August PdB. No Phoenix memo. No Pet Goat.
None of that stuff.
Apparently, 9/11 occurred in 1998.

 

As I watch tonight's episode, I can't help but notice that the screenwriter and the producer apparently aren't any kinder to the Bush administration's handling of pre- 9/11 than the Clinton administration, yet, members and supporters of the Bush administration haven't reacted in quite the crybaby, whining fashion as the Clinton sycophants.
Nor was the pre-movie publicity in any indicative that the Bush crew would be just as villified as Clinton.
Funny how the pissing and moaning came from the Clinton camp and not from the Bush side.

 

Considering that most conservatives define bias as anything less than servile religious awe toward all things Bush, I'm not surprised in the least that's how you feel.

If there's any portrayal unfavorable to the Bushies that's totally made up, give us a call.

And you might want to re-check your claim that "only the Clinton camp" was doing the moaning.

 

Bill Bennett went camping with Clinton?

 

Oysters and zinc supplements. It also helps when Peter North is your personal trainer. ;D

 

A friend asked me yesterday if I'd watched "Path to 9/11", and I told him I did not because of the rash fictionalization the movie contained. He agreed, but then quickly moved on to a part of the movie he thought was extremely compelling.

"Can you even imagine how frustrating it must have been, for them to have Osama bin Laden in their sights where all they had to do was pull the trigger, and not be given clearance (by Clinton) to do it?" he asked.

Problem is, that never happened, and the dramatization of that scene goes beyond "time compression" and moves into party hackery. The 9/11 commission co-chairs (one republican and one Democrat) were on the radio over the weekend talking about this very subject on Sunday, and confirm that any such instance is devious fiction. The 9/11 commission report, and the commissioners, lambasted George Tenet's intelligence community. One of the commissioners said the intelligence community "failed two administrations." There was never any "actionable intelligence" for them to act on to get bin Laden. It was all supposition and outright guessing.

And I'll even defend Bush (to an extent) on the August PDB which said, "bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." As described by the commission members, these PDBs were like tabloid magazines. They'd have a big declaration in the headline, but the nuts and bolts of the report were complete shit. And for this movie to take the work of the commission and dramatize it into the bullshit it apparently did is harmful to the United States of America and intellectually dishonest.

 

Point --
Here's the content of the 8/6/01 PDB. Seems a little more detailed than the average tab.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/

 

F_B,
I'm trying to read this and put myself in Bush's shoes pre- 9/11. That PDB would definitely have caused me to light a fire under CIA's ass to unearth more details so something could be done about it. Still, I think it's clear the intel community were a bunch of fucktards (Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet?) and to suggest that Clinton had bin Laden in his sights but refused to pull the trigger is bullshit, just like it would be bullshit to say Bush had a blueprint for 9/11 on his desk with that PDB.

The difference is Clinton was trying to do something about bin Laden while Bush showed a frightening lack of curiosity about the situation.

 

Point --
You're right, and I stil think the best possible result probably was that a couple of the guys got rolled up and (maybe) one plane gets saved.
I hadn't read the whole PDB in a long time. Some low level intel guys must have been going completely crazy.

UPDATE -- Apparently, they were.
The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President -- "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" -- has been widely noted in the past few years.
But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President -- to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.

The analytical arm of the CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were all in the red. They didn't know the place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know . . .

George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. "All right," he said. "You've covered your ass now."

Ron Suskind
The One Percent Doctrine

 

There was simply no smooth transition from one administration to the next.

Bush was determined to distance himself from everything Clinton. Good idea when it came to interns with crushes; bad idea on ignoring Al-Qaeda.

If Clinton said "A" is important, Bush automatically directed his attention to "B."

No matter what one thinks of the person in the Oval Office, his 4 or 8 years of experience should count for something.

And that holds true for whoever takes over in 2008. Regardless of the mistakes Bush has made, any president who automatically dismisses everything he did from 2000-2008 would be making a bad mistake.