alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

September 5, 2006

Issue of the Day

by AltHippo @ 4:56 pm. Filed under propaganda

As far as I can tell discussion of the ABC Freeper Fantasy “The Path to 9/11″ is the issue of the day, particularly Richard Clarke’s statements at ThinkProgess.

If you haven’t seen his remarks, Clark demolishes the winger wive’s tale of Clinton’s refusal to bomb bin Laden.

Wingers love this story. On early fall weekends they gather around camp fires with cases of Bud, toasting to a world without liberals, a world where freedom of speech means freedom of the right kind of speech, and telling this story over and over again. Sometimes a few details about Vince Foster and Hillary emerge, and someone will point out the significance of Hillary working for the Rose law firm, and Nixon’s secretary being named Rose. D**n it, I know she killed Vince Foster! The words explode from his chest, scaring the children.

Another man takes up the thought. What If bin Laden had found out about Clinton and Foster, and Clinton was being blackmailed, which was why Clinton didn’t bomb bin Laden. And healthcare, something about healthcare. At this point the two Clintons were running together in the man’s brain. It was the brain fever again. The PTSD he had caught from watching the X Files far too many times. He tried picturing Rush Limbaugh to calm himself down. But all he could picture in his mind’s eye was an amphibious creature that lived in the sewers. D**n that Michael Moore he says to no one in particular.

That’s why this story is in the docudrama. It’s not in the 9.11 report, but is part of the apocrypha, the lesser gospel of bin Laden and the Clintons.

I hear the propaganda will be catapulted using iPods (catapod? iPropaganda?): “And now they have announced that they will not show advertising on this big 40 million dollar investment and will distribute it for free to 100,000 educators around the country and on i-tunes. It’s basically a gift to the Republican party and the conservative movement. ”

Mendacity, so I just learned, is not just a foul odor as Tennesee Williams believed, it is an actual corrosive gas causing tooth decay. Writer/producer Cyrus Nowrasteh’s words make my teeth hurt: This movie is well-supported and well-documented. But everyone should be aware, and we say so upfront in a long legend — “The following dramatization…has composite and representative characters and incidents, and time compressions have been used for dramatic purposes.”

Well-supported and well-documented in what way? In what way can a work of fiction be well-supported? Well-supported by your imagination? And just what is well-documented? When the movie’s being shown? Is that what’s well-documented?

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4 Responses to “Issue of the Day”

  1. Bulworth Says:
    September 6th, 2006 at 9:33 am

    Osama bin forgotten must be making a comeback.

    The president is mentioning his name again, after saying some time ago that,
    “I don’t think that much about him”, which was some time after he promised to get OBL
    “dead or alive”.

    And now, there’s a new movie about to talk about him again, resurrect him from his media-exile
    in Pakistan, one of our “allies” that won’t cooperate (and with good reason) in allowing
    U.S. troops to hunt him on their soil.

    Now, maybe that August 6 memo–Al Qaeda determined to strike in U.S.–will make a comeback, too.

  2. AltHippo Says:
    September 6th, 2006 at 10:04 am

    That raises an interesting question. Instead of hunting down bin Laden, why not make a docudrama?

    We could have Timothy Bottoms, doing his Bush impersonation, personally hunting down bin Laden, tracking him to his cave. Then there’s a fight scene where they struggle a bit, but finally bin Laden gets pushed off a cliff. Ooh, better idea. Bush is about to get pushed off a cliff, but then he takes out Saddam Hussein’s pistol and shoots him.

    Could someone give me $40M so I can make my docudrama based on my interpretation of the 9.11 report obtained by sniffing its cover?

  3. KCinDC Says:
    September 7th, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    The real reason they won’t show advertising during this propaganda piece is that nobody wants to set themselves up for a Democratic boycott by having their ads aired during the thing. So if you can’t get advertisers, the face-saving move is to declare that it will be a special event shown “without commercial interruption”. Unless there are sponsors at the beginning and end, in which case I’d suggest they hire some extra phone staff.

  4. AltHippo Says:
    September 7th, 2006 at 4:01 pm

    “The real reason they won’t show advertising during this propaganda piece is that nobody wants to set themselves up for a Democratic boycott by having their ads aired during the thing.”

    I think you’re right. Though that would mean that potential advertisers sensed this would be controversial well before the event. I don’t have first-hand experience with television, but I have spoken to potential advertisers for shows that I was doing. The first question is usually along the lines of “who is the target market for this production? What’s the demographics of the audience?” I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that discussion.

    The second issue is the free distribution on iPods. There’s no doubt in my mind that people are hungry for free content. But forgoing even a nominal $1 per download tells me that ABC feels shaky about this. On the other hand, it’s also possible that ABC will sell advertising with the iPod downloads. Another possibility is that they’ve found a way to do a tax write off. Purely speculative on my part, but wouldn’t it be ironic if this fell into the category of public service broadcasting?

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