The ABCs of CYA

So ABC spent $40 million on a six-hour 9/11 movie, supposedly based on the 9/11 commission's report, and the Clinton administration-in-exile goes absolutely ballistic.

I'm not a 9/11 expert, I haven't read the report, I haven't previewed the movie. The only thing I care about is that the United States was attacked, and therefore the United States was fully justified in reducing the offending regimes to rubble. And as far as I'm concerned, the offending regimes included not only Afghanistan but Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But why is the Clinton bunch sweating the details like this? There's no question that the United States was attacked on several occasions on Clinton's watch. He responded to the first bombing of the World Trade Center with law enforcement and prosecution. I think anyone else would've done the same. That's because, until 9/11, the ability of al Qaeda to inflict massive casualties -- the kind of thing a country will go to war over -- hadn't been demonstrated.

Obviously, there's a political element to this. I think it's pretty safe to say that if al Qaeda had struck on 9/11/2000 instead of a year later, we wouldn't have been looking for scapegoats quite so quickly. But the Democrats and their friends at the New York Times insisted. They insisted despite knowing that if fingers were to be pointed, one would surely point to the Clinton Justice Department and Jamie Gorelick. That one would aim at a National Security Council apparatus that had bin Laden in its sights and refused to pull the trigger. That one would finally wag at Bill Clinton for "doing nothing" as al Qaeda gained strength, as unjustified as that characterization might be. It was Democrats who decided to make a hero of a man, Richard Clarke, who strikes me as a self-aggrandizing weasel, and whose account informs this ABC movie.

If Democrats didn't realize the direction the 9/11 commission was headed, Sandy Berger stealing classified documents from the National Archives should've made their antennae stand up straight.

And now they're raising hell about minor details, perhaps thinking that if they can prevail on these they can somehow erase the 1990s. Ain't gonna work.

The first rule of holes applies here. The more they complain, the more they draw attention to the major details. Khobar. The African embassies. The Cole.

That's what the movie's about, I presume. Not whether Sandy Berger slammed the phone on the CIA.

*****
If the Dems succeed in killing this thing I will be impressed for the Democrats and embarrassed for ABC. And boy, what a precedent it would set! Especially considering who's usually villified by Hollywood.

*****
"Dataman" at Lucianne.com has an excellent comment regarding this brouhaha: "There sure are an awful lot of people who don't want me to see this movie."

*****
One final afterthought: If the Democrats had said nothing about the movie, the emphasis -- in the blogosphere at least; I doubt there would've been much news coverage of a movie -- would have been on its treatment of the Bush administration! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!