Monday, September 18, 2006

What would a Dole administration have done differently? How about a Gore administration?

All films much engage in some measure of "theatrics" or they would be utterly unwatchable. There has never been a single, noteworthy historical painting, or film, that is the exact equivalent of an academic reference text.

For instance, the film "Patton" is riddled with inaccuracies, and some are quite historically misleading.
Expat Yank compares "The Path to 9/11" to "Patton", to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", to… Shakespeare, and to… Emmanuel Leutze's "General George Washington Crossing the Delaware". Besides that, Robert Tumminello does the logical (something hand-wringers so often fail to do); he considers the alternatives…
The main issue apparently irritating many is that they feel "Path's" inaccuracies stem from mostly one side: Clinton's. Actually, it just seems that way. For since most of the film covered a time frame in parallel with the 1993-2001 Clinton administration, it is therefore unavoidable that the Clinton people got much more "air time", and therefore, by default, their "actions" or "inactions" appeared to loom much larger in the scheme of things. (Hey, Clinton won the re-election he wanted in 1996, so his people have to take the hits. What would a Dole administration have done? We can't know. But probably little all that different.)

And the film doesn't exactly portray the (in office not even 9 months, as of September 11) Bush people as all that sharp either. … However, consider this: if Gore had been elected in 2000, and everything else had happened exactly the same way, could anyone have made a partisan case about the film's faults? It's hard to see how.

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