Pathological Lies to 9-11

I'm going to be a part of a little protest at Disney's corporate HQ in about an hour. This has really blown up in ABC's face, especially when you consider that every same conservative, and even a few insane ones, are now calling for the film's more controversial pieces to be edited or removed. These guys know that peddling outright falsehoods will do nothing but damage the conservative argument that 9-11 was all Clinton's fault. They think they can make it without having to lie. The facts don't really represent that, but what do they care?

My favorite conservosphere comments were from John Cole:

Let’s say off the bat that somebody will get fired for this. After ABC has to eat its $30 million investment they might sack whoever decided to aggressively promote a fictionalization of the events leading to 9/11, written by a known conservative activist and promoted exclusively to rightwing blogs and allied news outlets like Rush Limbaugh and NewsMax. Sensible managers would cut loose the genius who decided to chase the evaporating FOX News demographic and influence an election with blatantly untrue efforts to shift the blame for 9/11 to a previous administration.

And Mark Coffey at Decision '08:

Again, the partisan aspect interests me not at all; this is 9/11, and ‘reasonably accurate’ isn’t good enough. Either go completely fiction or stick to the facts. This sounds an awful lot like the Dan Rather excuse for the National Guard fiasco (that the essence of the story was true, even if the details were fabricated), and I’m not interested in this sort of clever parsing of words.

I understand the need to do composite scenes and characters in media with a limited duration, but this is going a bit far. I’ll probably still watch it, but my enthusiasm has dimmed considerably.

Suffice it to say I would NOT want to be the editor on that project. I'd literally be there for the next 36 hours straight.

Meanwhile the Senate Democratic leadership isn't fucking around at all, making veiled (and wholly possible) threats about license revocation.

I do think this is sucking up a lot of oxygen that could be better spent detailing some of the amazing stuff that's happened this week, which shows the bankruptcy of the path FROM 9-11, but I do find this whole thing to be a consequence of unaccountable Big Media, and I want to do my part as part of the people-powered movement to make sure we're all heard. So I'll be there at 4:00pt.