Conservatives Should Hate Disney's Path to 911, Too

When I heard that Disney was making a film to be broadcast on ABC called The Path to 9/11, I was concerned. I thought it was too soon to be making a cartoon about September 11. Dramatizing the terrorist attacks using anthropomorphized talking and singing animals did not strike me as the best way to tell the story. I thought it might be inappropriate to have, say, Scrooge McDuck play Osama Bin Laden or even Mickey Mouse play Rudy Giuliani, as much as I admire Mickey Mouse. I was worried that Disney might take some literary license with historical fact the way they did in Pocahontas and Tarzan. By teaming up with Harry Potter publisher Scholastic to help distribute the film to schools, it seemed that the miniseries was being aimed at children instead of adults. Still, I thought, even children deserve some accuracy and the format invited questions of taste.

I was relieved to find out that instead of making an animated version of the events of September 11, Disney was actually making a live-action film in the tradition of such live-action Disney classics as Son of Flubber and The Shaggy Dog. I still wasn't sure that America was ready for September 11 to be turned into heart-warming family entertainment but at least some of my worst fears were allayed. Considering that Disney produced the wonderful Chronicles of Narnia and was planning to produce a miniseries about the Holocaust helmed by Mel Gibson, I thought, how bad could it be? I was further reassured when I learned that the Republican chair of the 9/11 Commission, Tom Kean, was a paid consultant on the film, director David Cunningham was once an evangelical Christian missionary and screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh was an avowed conservative who had spoken at the conservative Liberty Film Festival. The early reviews by such respected conservatives as Rush Limbaugh, Govindi Murty and Dean Barnett at Hugh Hewitt's blog were ecstatic. But the more I heard about the film the more troubled I became about it.

I have not actually seen The Path to 9/11 (apparently I was one of the few conservative bloggers who did not get a review copy), but since that didn't prevent conservatives from attacking the movie about the Reagans that CBS eventually pulled under pressure, I feel no qualms about weighing in on this film. While I appreciate that the miniseries reportedly puts most of the blame for 9/11 where it belongs--on Monica Lewinsky--I am bothered by reports that it also criticizes President Bush. I was astounded by this statement from David Cunningham on the blog for the movie: "You may feel we 'bash' Clinton and/or you may feel we 'bash' Bush but the facts are that the eight years from the first WTC bombing to the day of 9/11 involved two administrations with plenty of culpability all around." For the life of me I cannot think of anything that President Bush has done wrong. Does the film "bash" him for ordering interrogation tactics that were not "tough" enough? For not invading more countries? For not skirting more bothersome laws that stymied him from stopping terrorists? What more could President Bush have done?

The blog about the making of the film seems to consist of one "clarification" after another. It seems to me it would have been a lot easier if the director had just made the film itself clearer. In one of his "clarifications" he claims that the people who worked on the film "have a wide range of political perspectives" and that "most of those perspectives (which is the vast majority in Hollywood) would be considered 'liberal' or 'left'." This statement certainly did not reassure me and left me even more confused. Although Cunningham has very good conservative credentials, he must be a very weak director if he allowed these liberal perspectives into the film. Is he saying the film doesn't represent the director's vision? Has he never heard of the auteur theory?

Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh just makes things worse by claiming, "This miniseries is balanced in its presentation." Someone should tell him that the correct phrase is "fair and balanced." "Balanced" without "fair" sounds suspiciously like moral relativism, which is the worst kind of liberalism. If you want to know what "balanced" without "fair" is like, all you have to do is watch CNN or read The New York Times. For example, after signing the order to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in 1998, President Clinton had two whole years to get him but failed to do so. President Bush had only eight months to get him before 9/11. It may be "balanced" to equate the two but it wouldn't be fair. It seems to me that President Clinton is more accountable for not getting Bin Laden after two years especially since we reportedly had him surrounded in Afghanistan and let him slip away (though perhaps not exactly the way it's depicted in the film). How hard could it have been to find a 6-foot-4 terrorist after two years?

In her review of the film New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley, who has never been much of a stickler for the facts in her own columns, writes that Bush "is shown sweaty and dismissive in jogging shorts" (though I have never seen him sweat), and she seems to have no problem with the idea that "it is a fictionalized account of what took place." Well, I do. I was very chagrined to discover that not only had some events been invented, some important events had been left out of the film entirely. Apparently the director didn't bother filming the scene where President Bush learns of the attacks while reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren. How could they leave out one of the Bush's greatest moments as President, the seven minutes when he sat there motionless and plotted out his entire strategy for the War on Terror in his head? Perhaps it wouldn't have been very dramatic to film the President just sitting there for seven minutes but the filmmakers could have telescoped time a bit, as they claim to do in other scenes, and showed him sitting there for, say, four minutes. And I have not heard any mention of a scene showing Saddam Hussein planning the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Leaving out an important scene like that seems to me to be a big dramatic oversight, basically confusing the viewer by making the invasion of Iraq appear to be completely pointless.

I wonder why many conservatives are embracing this film. Although the screenwriter is a close personal friend of Rush Limbaugh's, who is a man with very few close personal friends, it's hard to believe that he would let that influence his review of the film. Maybe he fell asleep during the second half. Some conservatives such as The Anchoress and Ed Morrissey are concerned that Democrats in Congress are trying to pressure the network into censoring the film by threatening government action. But isn't that what we have been trying to get the FCC to do for years? For example, by fining such indecent programs as Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, the FCC has forced CBS to question whether it should air uncensored a 9/11 documentary that has bad language. I thought this was a good thing and it seems hypocritical to be against chilling free speech and prior restraint only when Democrats do it.

It seems odd that liberals are up in arms about this docudrama while many conservatives seem to have no problems with it even though the filmmakers themselves admit it is just as unfair to President Bush as it is to President Clinton and that they just made stuff up. Do we hate President Clinton so much that we are willing to look the other way when President Bush is unfairly attacked? Although ABC claims to be re-editing the film to mollify Clinton supporters, it is apparently doing nothing to make Bush look better. I am very surprised that my fellow conservatives, with few exceptions, are crowing about the film. Didn't the brave Swift Boat Veterans teach us about the importance of standing up for the truth? Shouldn't the truth matter to conservatives, too?

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