Saturday, September 09, 2006

 

Paid Commission


I don't usually go traipsing into the political end of the blogoshere because the water is deep and most of the "lifeguards" are trying to hand you an anvil. But sometimes politics is too damn close to creationism to ignore.

You may have heard by now that the Disney/ABC television "docudrama," Path to 9/11, is generating more than a little controversy. The main contretemps is that the movie intends to unfairly portray the Clinton administration as unwilling to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. This is, of course, no little hiccup over a detail; it is a clear attempt to shift the blame from where it belongs as far as Americans themselves are concerned: the bureaucratic inertia that no political party has a monopoly on; to a President who was, at the time, accused of sending cruise missiles after bin Laden in order to distract from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Worse yet, the production bills itself as being based on the the bipartisan work of the September 11 Commission, desite the Commission's own findings to the contrary about Clinton.

But that's just politics. Here's where it gets creationist:

It turns out that the Disney/ABC director on the project is David Cunningham, who, in turn, is the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM).

The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry." As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's in film industry jobs "so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out," according to a YWAM report.
Cunningham then recruited Cyrus Nowrasteh, a young Iranian-American screenwriter and outspoken conservative, who appeared as a featured speaker at the Liberty Film Festival, which is intended to promote conservative-themed films that supposedly are too "politically incorrect" to gain entry to mainstream film festivals.

As the LA Times reports:

[M]any conservatives have complained that Democrats have a selective memory. They point out that Democrats seemed unconcerned about Michael Moore's 2004 documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," which pilloried the Bush administration for its response to the terrorist attacks.
And therein lies the difference. 'Ignore the fact that someone is trading on the September 11 Commission's reputation in order to tell lies, it's okay as long as it's payback!' But nobody with at least a brain or two to rub together ever mistook Michael Moore, with his body of work starting at Roger & Me, up through Bowling For Columbine until it culminated in Fahrenheit 9/11, for anything other than a partisan, for the simple reason that he never hid it. But these partisan activists, in the manner of the Discovery Institute, being unable to make their case with intelligence and wit in an open and above-board fashion, have to hide what they are doing and sneak it in by the back door of a supposed "docudrama," leaving the truth out in the cold.

This effort, with the unfortunate, and one can only hope inadvertent, assistance of September 11 Commission chairman, Tom Kean, has hijacked the Commission's attempts to prevent another such attack. By calling the bipartisan nature of the effort into question this way, these people have done more harm to America in four hours than bin Laden has done in the last five years.

Unfortunately, most fanatics don't care.

Comments:
Good post, John. But fix your last word.
 
Thanks. Must've looked past that a dozen times.
 
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