Heaven Forbid

The blogging left is united in raising their arms up in frantic “Bwaaa!” mode over ABC’s TV movie “The Path to 9/11”. At festering pools like the inappropriately named Americablog, you have to look inbetween the anti-ABC posts to find any other content.

They’re crying about the combining of different events into one event and other artistic license issues. But don’t get to thinking they’re angry at the writers for not sticking to the exact historical record, oh no.

They’re angry that the TV movie places some blame on the Clinton Administration.

Here, John in DC at Americablog wants Congressional investigations. He claims that ABC is trying to influence the upcoming mid-term elections.

Here, he whines about pre-screening tapes not being provided to Clinton, Albright and Berger.

I seem to remember back, a long, long time ago, so far back it seems that the leftist bloggers have forgotten about it. There was this made for TV movie about a guy named, let me get the spelling right on this one, Ronald Wilson Reagan, or some such.

Now, what I remember about this TV movie is that it was based on nothing. It was written out of whole cloth by people who didn’t exactly admire the man. Those who did admire him hooted and hollared about it to CBS, pointing out the grievous factual errors and extensive list of items taken by the writers and the director as “artistic license” and CBS finally decided not to show it and handed it over to Showtime.

I also remember the left characterizing the protestations as “Whining”. I also remembering them saying that the pressuring of CBS was “Censorship”. This is a link to a left wing blog at the time saying exactly that.*

Someone posting comments under the name “Rheinhard” remembered it as well in the comments section at Oliver Willis’ (Occupation: Toole) place:

Remeber when the conservadroid whiners got CBS to pull its TV movie because it didn’t suck Reagan’s dead cock enough?

We need to try to do the same thing here.

I have noticed no calls of “Censorship” or “Whining” coming from rightwing blogs as of yet. And, oddly enough, there is nothing of the sort coming from the leftwing blogs either.

As a last point of reference which I would like to get onto the record, John in DC posts yet another rant against ABC, pointing out that one of the bits of artistic license the screenwriter, Cyrus Nowrasteh, did not disagree with being left in the movie is when the actor protraying Sandy Burger slams down the phone receiver after speaking with a CIA officer.

John in DC’s reaction to it being left in:

YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11TH, YOU FREAKS.

That is his. Caps and all.

I’m not exactly sure what he is screaming about. If his past comments about his site and places like the dKos being an excellent cross-section of mainstream leftwing opinion are truly his feelings, he should know that, as of mid-April of this year, according to a dKos poll, 60% of the people who visit the dKos are “Over 9/11”.

Shortly after that poll was posted at a number of rightwing sites, like LGF, the poll swung strongly the other direction. But only then.

*Like us here at RNS, most blogs, including those on the left, are cataloging their older stuff to make room on the server, so more links to bigger leftist sites aren’t forthcoming via a GoogleBlogs search. When I get a chance, I’ll go through my old stuff to see who I noticed repeating the meme at the time.