Aggh! A few days ago I saw some items in Daily Kos warning that "The Road to 9/11" was pre-election propaganda for the Right. But poking around the Internet, I saw other stories that suggested the film was mostly just dramatic and absorbing and neither liberal nor conservative in orientation. Michael Medved has convinced me of the error of my ways.
This evening I happened to be listening to a Christian Right AM radio station. In ten minutes' time I heard Medved deliver two plugs for "The Road to 9/11." The second time I caught most of it on my digital recorder. Here's the transcript:
... The truth is that terrorist strikes against America began long before 2001, and a superb upcoming mini-series on ABC-TV, "The Path to 9/11," makes that point unforgettably clear. The five-hour dramatization begins with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, highlighting eight years of confusion and passivity in the Clinton administration, while Bin Laden and colleagues intensified their anti-American jihad. As early as 1983 Hezbollah had killed 241 Americans in Beirut, and even four years before that, the embassy hostage crisis in Iran highlighted the new threat from Islamic extremism. Terrorism was hardly a response to the war in Iraq but that war was part of our response to a long series of atrocities reaching back more than twenty-five years. I'm Michael Medved.
That really tore it with me.
Next up was Hugh Hewitt interviewing the film's producer and one of its principal actors. Overtly, Hewitt made it sound like the film was just plain great drama, and the producer made it sound as if it was faithfully based on the 9/11 Commission Report. But taking the picture as it has now emerged -- the selective pre-screenings, Richard Clarke's assertion that at least one key scene is 180 degrees around from what actually occurred, and the smoking gun of the Medved plug, I've not only written ABC to protest, I'm not going to watch ABC again if they air this crap.