Beat Again!
There comes a moment in most contests when a keen observer can detect a momentum shift. Just such a moment occurred two weeks ago with the Buffalo Bills leading the Patriots 17-7 and driving in the third period. On fourth and one from the Patriots 7-yard line, the Bills elect to go for it, run Willis McGahee into the line and get stuffed.
I watched the rest of the game but I knew it was over. The Patriots took the ball and drove 93 yards for the score. Still only 17-14, with plenty of time left, but it was over. Final score 19-17, Pats.
This week offered up a similar momentum switch as Democrat hopes for taking Congress began to fade like the Bills hopes of knocking off the Pats.
It all began to come undone on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Seeing those images again had an effect. And then, unaccountably, ABC went ahead and broadcast "Path to 9/11" over the strenuous objections of Bill Clinton and sundry other Democrats. I suspect even the most partisan of Democrats must have been a little taken aback at the heavy-handedness of the Dems' run at Disney. Threatening their broadcast license?
For a Conservative, having been on the receiving end of plenty of Hollywood hit pieces left me with decidedly mixed emotions on the program. On the one hand, I have my issues with the whole "docu-drama" genre. Too often, the ones I'd seen had become psuedo-historical platforms for launching a partisan agenda.
On the other hand, it's an important subject. Television is still THE medium for telling a big story to the masses. If there were blatant distortions, it risked being seen as some sort of propaganda piece. If there were blatant distortions, I wouldn't want to see it, even if those distortions tilted towards my side of the political spectrum.
I watched. It was pretty good, excellent in places. It made George Tenet, Sandy Burglar and Madeleine Albright look bad. They deserve to look bad. It made Richard Clarke and John O'Neill look like heroes. What happened to Richard Clarke? Brilliant guy, but evidently he got ignored on a bi-partisan basis.
It suggested that Clinton's Monica troubles may have compromised his freedom of action in confronting bin Laden. C'mon now, does anyone seriously think that they didn't? Does anyone think that his travails didn't inflame the radicals? Oral sex with a Jewish girl in the Oval Office? Does anyone think that facing impeachment didn't distract the administration?
Anyway, they showed it. It's into the bloodstream. The President gave a great speech in the middle of it. People realized that five years have gone by without attack. And, people got a rememberance of the Clinton years. Honestly, who can say any drama is perfectly accurate? I'm sure there were trifling inaccuracies in the presentation. Things were condensed, scenes created that never strictly happened, but the essential historical narrative was intact.
Interestingly, Clinton paid a lot more attention to Iraq than Afghanistan. Astonishingly, he chose the day he admitted lying to the American people about Monica to launch missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan. Appallingly, he chose to launch a bombing campaign against Iraq the day he was impeached. No politics there. It's hard to believe that it took impeachment to get Clinton to do something about national security.
Does anybody else remember John Kerry exhorting the President to take out Saddam in 1998?
Alone if necessary?
Clinton knows that the main impression people will get about his presidency was that he had an affair, got caught, lied about it, got caught lying, got impeached and as a result did not fully confront the threat emerging from Al Qaeda. As a draft-dodger, and a felon, he lacked the moral authority to order men into battle and so he limited himself to ordering missile strikes and bombing raids.
9/11 happened on George Bush's watch. That makes him responsible. It's too bad nobody from either administration didn't take out bin Laden before 9/11. But there can be no doubt about which party has responded more forcefully since.
There comes a moment in most contests when a keen observer can detect a momentum shift. Just such a moment occurred two weeks ago with the Buffalo Bills leading the Patriots 17-7 and driving in the third period. On fourth and one from the Patriots 7-yard line, the Bills elect to go for it, run Willis McGahee into the line and get stuffed.
I watched the rest of the game but I knew it was over. The Patriots took the ball and drove 93 yards for the score. Still only 17-14, with plenty of time left, but it was over. Final score 19-17, Pats.
This week offered up a similar momentum switch as Democrat hopes for taking Congress began to fade like the Bills hopes of knocking off the Pats.
It all began to come undone on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Seeing those images again had an effect. And then, unaccountably, ABC went ahead and broadcast "Path to 9/11" over the strenuous objections of Bill Clinton and sundry other Democrats. I suspect even the most partisan of Democrats must have been a little taken aback at the heavy-handedness of the Dems' run at Disney. Threatening their broadcast license?
For a Conservative, having been on the receiving end of plenty of Hollywood hit pieces left me with decidedly mixed emotions on the program. On the one hand, I have my issues with the whole "docu-drama" genre. Too often, the ones I'd seen had become psuedo-historical platforms for launching a partisan agenda.
On the other hand, it's an important subject. Television is still THE medium for telling a big story to the masses. If there were blatant distortions, it risked being seen as some sort of propaganda piece. If there were blatant distortions, I wouldn't want to see it, even if those distortions tilted towards my side of the political spectrum.
I watched. It was pretty good, excellent in places. It made George Tenet, Sandy Burglar and Madeleine Albright look bad. They deserve to look bad. It made Richard Clarke and John O'Neill look like heroes. What happened to Richard Clarke? Brilliant guy, but evidently he got ignored on a bi-partisan basis.
It suggested that Clinton's Monica troubles may have compromised his freedom of action in confronting bin Laden. C'mon now, does anyone seriously think that they didn't? Does anyone think that his travails didn't inflame the radicals? Oral sex with a Jewish girl in the Oval Office? Does anyone think that facing impeachment didn't distract the administration?
Anyway, they showed it. It's into the bloodstream. The President gave a great speech in the middle of it. People realized that five years have gone by without attack. And, people got a rememberance of the Clinton years. Honestly, who can say any drama is perfectly accurate? I'm sure there were trifling inaccuracies in the presentation. Things were condensed, scenes created that never strictly happened, but the essential historical narrative was intact.
Interestingly, Clinton paid a lot more attention to Iraq than Afghanistan. Astonishingly, he chose the day he admitted lying to the American people about Monica to launch missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan. Appallingly, he chose to launch a bombing campaign against Iraq the day he was impeached. No politics there. It's hard to believe that it took impeachment to get Clinton to do something about national security.
Does anybody else remember John Kerry exhorting the President to take out Saddam in 1998?
Alone if necessary?
Clinton knows that the main impression people will get about his presidency was that he had an affair, got caught, lied about it, got caught lying, got impeached and as a result did not fully confront the threat emerging from Al Qaeda. As a draft-dodger, and a felon, he lacked the moral authority to order men into battle and so he limited himself to ordering missile strikes and bombing raids.
9/11 happened on George Bush's watch. That makes him responsible. It's too bad nobody from either administration didn't take out bin Laden before 9/11. But there can be no doubt about which party has responded more forcefully since.
posted by alwaysright at
6:35 PM
1 Comments:
Where's bin Laden? Your whole ugly hypothesis fails miserably when confronted with the truth... where's bin Laden? No... he's not in Iraq, not under a desk in the Oval Office, where could he be? The more I read your arguments the more I sense an intellectual decay, every fabric of reason is stretched to incorporate a shot at the Clintons and a fawning idolization of a moronic, failed Presidency. I think it all boils down to blow job envy, even though Monica was a Republican operative stooge, you still can't stand the thought that he was getting blow jobs and you weren't. The salient facts are that Clinton may have been considerably more proactive about bin Laden than this administration could ever dream of. And now the truth is coming out... when Perle, Fund Adleman and Rubin turn on the administration one has to summise that something went and continues to go terribly wrong. Bin Laden remains at large, the Taliban has regrouped, Iraq has become a killing field and even with all the 'Number 3's' of Al Qaeda either captured or dead, apparently they have a 'very deep bench' from which to draw upon. Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, being their favorite recruiting tool. Speaking of tools and blow jobs, this may have been the greatest preemptive ejaculation of all time!!
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