House of Eratosthenes

Last week, someone said something via e-mail that disturbed me a little tiny bit…kind of like, when a fella marries a beautiful, skinny girl, sometimes during the honeymoon she gains a little tiny bit of weight. It just freakin’ snowballs from there. During the first pregnancy, she gains seventy pounds, and during the delivery, loses seven. By the time the kid is sixteen, his mother weighs more than the car he’s learning to drive, and she’s blaming it on “baby fat.” Dad’s wondering what happened to that glass-cutting ass in the Bongo shorts that inspired him to propose, although he won’t say it out loud — and the answer has something to do with that first mouthful of wedding cake frosting. An ounce here, an ounce there.

That’s how this fella’s e-mail comment disturbed me. Just a little tiny bit at first, and then, it grew. Now we’re at the point where it’s worth a mention. Past it, rather.

Dear Fellow Democrat,

Does a major national broadcast network want to stain itself by presenting an irresponsible, slanderous, fraudulent, “docu-drama” to the American public?

Not if you and I have the last word — but either way, we’re about to find out.

The ABC television network — a cog in the Walt Disney empire — unleashed a promotional blitz in the last week for a new “docudrama” called “The Path to 9/11”. ABC has thrown its corporate might behind the two-night production, and bills it as a public service: a TV event, to quote the ABC tagline, “based on the 9/11 Commission Report”.

That’s false. “The Path to 9/11” is actually a bald-faced attempt to slander Democrats and revise history right before Americans vote in a major election.

The miniseries, which was put together by right-wing conservative writers, relies on the old GOP playbook of using terrorism to scare Americans. “The Path to 9/11” mocks the truth and dishonors the memory of 9/11 victims to serve a cheap, callous political agenda. It irresponsibly misrepresents the facts and completely distorts the truth.

Yeah, a few months ago I registered as a Democrat. Heh, you know what? Let’s borrow a few words from this Democrat-writer guy: “That’s false.” I did nothing to indicate to anyone, anywhere, that I was a Democrat; I simply visited the Democrats’ official website, and when it asked me if I would like to receive updates I said, hell yes! Since then, I’ve received education after education, and I’m glad I answered the question the way I did.

There is something about being a Democrat. You know the saying, “When the facts are on your side, pound the facts, when the law is on your side, pound the law, when neither is on your side, pound the table”? Democrats…have a habit of jumping forward to those last three words.

Here, in “Path to 9/11,” we have a rather unique situation. I say this after listening to both sides, not from watching the film itself, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have access to the information that the film would be dramatizing and/or distorting anyway. But having disclaimed that, I can’t help noticing that so far as I know — the facts are on the Democrats’ side. This really doesn’t come up very often. But the film says something happened a certain way that makes 9/11 look like the Clinton administration’s fault…Clinton and crew say “Hey, that didn’t happen and nobody said that” — and the network drops the hot rock.

Now, this letter-writer guy could have made a powerful case by articulating the following: The script plays “fast-and-loose” with the truth, it’s inserting spoken lines and events that didn’t happen, and couldn’t have happened. There are Republican-leaning people involved in the production of the movie, and the movie is coming out around Labor Day of an even-numbered year, right before a midterm election in which terrorism is seen by both sides as a lynchpin issue. These are compelling points to make.

But he said…

Does a major national broadcast network want to stain itself by presenting an irresponsible, slanderous, fraudulent, “docu-drama” to the American public? Not if you and I have the last word…

And that’s why this missive bothers me the way it does. The way a brand-new wife gains three pounds when the wedding ring goes on her finger, and four hundred pounds in the next ten years. Bothers me a little, then bothers me a lot.

I can’t help but notice, having “the last word” is what it’s all about for these people.

To the people who don’t give a rat’s ass about Democrats OR Republicans — the ones who decide our elections — the paramount question is this: The last time Democrats had power, did they do some things that made the September 11 attacks possible? Could the Democrats bear culpability in allowing this to happen? At least somewhat? And if so, does that culpability rest on policy decisions in which the Democrats are politically vested? Policy decisions they can be counted upon to decide the same way, decade after decade, anytime they are put in power? Like, for example, treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than a military issue?

If there’s a way to answer those questions that makes the Democrats look good…at least kinda good…the Democrats could just address them kinda directly. But they didn’t even choose to do that, they chose to go the “last word” route.

And this is why the comment from last week bothers me a whole lot more right now, like an 800-pound wife, when, last week, it bothered me just a tiny bit, like the first time after the wedding the wife no longer fit into her miniskirt. Democrats could have ‘fessed up and ended up looking okay. They could have gone the way the Republicans have gone, pushing the “9/11 == Wake Up Call For America” angle. They could have said, yes, we handled terrorism as a law enforcement issue instead of as a matter of life and death…because we were elected to reflect public sentiment, and that’s what the prevaililng sentiment was at the time. And since then, we’ve all learned something.

I think Krauthammer captured it best in this article from 2003:

Bracing for the Apocolypse

The domestic terror alert jumps to 9/11 levels. Heathrow Airport is ringed by tanks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting disappear from Washington store shelves. Osama resurfaces. North Korea reopens its plutonium processing plant and threatens pre-emptive attack. The Second Gulf War is about to begin. This is not the Apocalypse. But it is excellent preparation for it.

You don’t get to a place like this overnight. It takes at least, oh, a decade. We are now paying the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. During that decade, every major challenge to America was deferred. The chief aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road:

Iraq: Saddam continued defying the world and building his arsenal, even as the United States acquiesced to the progressive weakening of U.N. sanctions and then to the expulsion of all weapons inspectors.

North Korea: When it threatened to go nuclear in 1993, Clinton managed to put off the reckoning with an agreement to freeze Pyongyang’s program. The agreement — surprise! — was a fraud. All the time, the North Koreans were clandestinely enriching uranium. They are now in full nuclear breakout.

Terrorism: The first World Trade Center attack occurred in 1993, followed by the blowing up of two embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole. Treating terrorism as a problem of law enforcement, Clinton dispatched the FBI–and the odd cruise missile to ostentatiously kick up some desert sand. Osama was offered up by Sudan in 1996. We turned him away for lack of legal justification.

That is how one acts on holiday: Mortal enemies are dealt with not as combatants, but as defendants. Clinton flattered himself as looking beyond such mundane problems to a grander transnational vision (global warming, migration and the like), while dispatching American military might to quell “teacup wars” in places like Bosnia. On June 19, 2000, the Clinton administration solved the rogue-state problem by abolishing the term and replacing it with “states of concern.” Unconcerned, the rogues prospered, arming and girding themselves for big wars.

How much more worthy of our trust Democrats would be, if they simply stepped forward and said “we slumbered like all of you; we have learned something important like everyone else.”

But noooooooo. They chose to protect their golden-boy Clinton, who can do no wrong. Because — it’s been proven — when Clinton does something wrong, we just change the truth of what transpired so that his glorious legacy stays spit-shined and polished. Truth always makes Clinton look good…where his name is uttered, truth is pliable.

Democrats have to get in “the last word.” Were our previous President deserving of his “so shiny I can see my face in it” legacy, this would not be necessary. But that’s the way they operate. The way they think. Truth has nothing to do with it. They’ve said it themselves.

It’s massively disturbing. Gilbert-Grape’s-Mom disturbing.

Some people are still married to two-ton-Tessie. I really don’t get why.

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A Tiny Bit Disturbing At FirstFriday, September 15th, 2006

A Tiny Bit Disturbing At First
Friday, September 15th, 2006