The path to enlightenment on "The Path to 9/11"
I have only watched a few minutes of "The Path to 9/11," the ABC docudrama that started Sunday night and concludes tonight. Clinton operatives have been howling for a week about it, claiming the depictions are inaccurate and unfair to Their Man.
The difference is, I'm telling you I haven't seen much of it. This knucklehead for The Huffington Post, which has been doing some of the loudest howling, obviously hasn't seen ANY of it ... but he writes as though he has: "On Tuesday, ABC was forced to concede that 'The Path to 9/11' is 'a dramatization, not a documentary.'"
Dude, first off, if you'd seen even a minute of the program, you'd have known that your own self. Second, ABC has never claimed "The Path to 9/11" was a documentary. Here is the press release that was sent to me on July 5 and posted to ABC's publicly accessible media relations web site:
ABC will present “The Path to 9/11,” a dramatization of the events detailed in The 9/11 Commission Report and other sources, in an epic miniseries event.
The clueless Huffer-Puffer goes on to spin an elaborate web of associations that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the production MUST be biased (sight unseen, of course) because this person on "The Path to 9/11" worked with that person who once capped knees for Lee Atwater, and so on. It's Joe McCarthy meets "The Last Temptation of Christ" protest campaign -- only it's Democrats this time, making the attacks doubly bizarre.
I've been hearing from other conspiracy theorists in recent days, claiming that Democrats were denied requests to see DVD screeners of "The Path to 9/11," while Republicans were freely sharing them among those in their "network." Uhhhh, those DVDs have been floating around since early July. They were slipped under every hotel room door and left in stacks on press tables at TV critics' tour. I'm sure they were circulating around New York, too. They could've been had by any reasonably plugged-in person.
Again, don't call it a conspiracy just because you're lazy. Or clueless.
As to the criticisms of the show itself, I can't speak to those. I haven't worked up the enthusiasm to watch, nor am I likely to. Nor have I listened to the 9/11 Commission Report, which has been sitting on my iTunes for a couple of years, though I suppose I should. James Wolcott feels the same way, and puts his finger on what I think is so wrong with all the observances of which this docudrama is just one:
Even if The Path to 9/11 were politically pure, its raison d'etre would be suspect. How many times and how many ways must the adrenaline be pumped, the tragedy replayed, and the suffering exploited? The fall of the towers has become a ritual fetish, an annual haunting, that doesn't exorcise fear, but replenishes it.
Wolcott is worth a read. He quotes Simon Jenkins at length, who also makes some provocative points, none of which I suspect you'll hear expressed on the nonstop cable coverage today.
