Defending Obama's Record As Compared to Bush's, NYT's Maureen Dowd Invokes… a Hollywood Movie?!

As even Maureen Dowd is forced to come to terms with the fact that larger and larger sections of America — even CNN — are asking “Was Bush Better President Than Obama?”, the indignant New York Times columnist goes on to make a colossal effort to remind Americans how the Bush White House "broke creative new ground in thuggery and skulduggery."

How does she proceed to do that? By writing …a review of …a Hollywood movie. The film about

…a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts … being hounded by the most powerful men on earth [Valerie Plame] … is a vivid reminder of one of the most egregious abuses of power in history, and there are deliciously diabolical turns by actors playing Scooter Libby, David Addington and Rove. Plame’s C.I.A. bosses are portraits in cravenness, cutting her loose at the moment she starts receiving death threats and her Iraqi sources become endangered.

Well, yes. Notwithstanding the fact that Fair Game is collaborative effort by leftist Bush- (and Cheney-)haters — director Doug Liman "does not use an Oliver Stone sledgehammer on history" is the best Maureen Dowd can say in the filmmakers' defense — it is the movie that Brent Bozell calls

the ridiculous Valerie Plame "docudrama" titled "Fair Game," complete with sound bites of her real-life congressional testimony. Those evil-Bush-years commercials will run in the [2010 mid-term] campaign's final weeks without a single reporter batting an eye.

Indeed. Remember that all this comes in the wake of Obama, and the Democrats, complaining about Republican propaganda and the undue influence of foreign operatives in the 2010 elections. However:

"Citizens United" is a court case that demonstrated how media and entertainment conglomerates get more power in a democracy than every other institution, and how conservative voices are often squashed and mocked by the liberal media. … By contrast, powerful Hollywood leftists had no problem getting their documentaries with political overtones widely distributed in theatres as Citizens United was being squashed.

But wait for the punchline.

And guess who's financed that "Fair Game" movie? A film company named Imagenation Abu Dhabi. The executive producer is Mohamed Khalaf al-Mazrouei, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Media Company. But [Barack] Obama won't be pounding the podium against that foreign influence.