Posted on 06/21/2003 12:33:37 PM PDT by Pokey78
According to one version of history, President George Bush was so slow to react to the momentous attacks of 11 September 2001 that he continued reading to a group of primary school children in Florida even after being informed of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Centre.
Then, after making an anodyne remark about finding "the folks who committed this act", he was whisked off in Air Force One, first to Shreveport, Louisiana and thence to an underground bunker in Nebraska, where he was hastily coached in the art of responding to the crisis in an appropriately presidential manner.
That, however, is not the George Bush who emerges from a new television docudrama due to air on cable in time for the second anniversary of the attacks this September.
In this version, the President is all swagger and seize-the-moment bravado. "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me," he says. "I'll be at home. Waiting for the bastard." "But Mr President ..." stammers his Secret Service chief. "Try 'Commander-in-Chief'," Mr Bush corrects him, "whose present command is, 'Take the President home!'"
If this scenario sounds like wishful thinking cooked up by the Republican National Committee, it probably is, given that the film, entitled DC 9/11, was produced and written by a direct associate of the President's, Lionel Chetwynd, in close co-operation with Mr Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove.
From the administration's point of view, it is arguably, the most successful attempt to date to recruit Hollywood to help the White House in its war on terrorism - or, in this case, its war on the Democratic presidential nominee in the November 2004 election.
Mr Chetwynd is not only a well-known conservative in Hollywood circles, with credits spanning political dramas and biblical stories. He also sits on the White House Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
Mr Rove, meanwhile, has a special eye for propaganda - not only did he conceive of Mr Bush's recent post-Iraq Top Gun-style landing on an aircraft carrier, he was also the one who explained away the President's peregrinations on 11 September by claiming, less than convincingly, that Air Force One itself was under direct threat of attack.
Although nobody has seen the finished product, the script of DC 9/11 was leaked to the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper, which described its portrayal of "a nearly infallible, heroic president with little or no dissension in his ranks and a penchant for delivering articulate, stirring, off-the-cuff address to his colleagues".
At one point, according to the script, he tells Democratic Party leaders: "I won't be seeking a declaration of war. With a shadowy enemy, specificity makes that problematic." That sounds awfully sophisticated for the malapropism-prone George Dubya.
Amazingly, Mr Chetwynd denies his film is propaganda in any form. He insists that everything in the film comes from the public record - either published accounts or information gleaned from his own interviews with the President, the White House chief of staff Andy Card, Mr Rove and others. "This isn't propaganda," he told the The Washington Post last week. "It's a straightforward docudrama. I would hope what's presented is a fully coloured and nuanced picture of a human being in a difficult situation."
The fact that it paints its subject in the best possible light at every turn certainly can't hurt the Bush cause, however. It is part of an emerging pattern whereby the anniversaries of 11 September are exploited as political advertisements for the Bush administration. This year it will be the airing of DC 9/11; next year, with just two months to go before the next presidential election, it will be the Republican National Convention in New York.
This is the second article about this upcoming movie in which the writer appears ignorant of the state of the record.
It IS a matter of record that President Bush demanded to return to the WH over the objections of the Secret Service. That the libs have wanted to deny this fact (nothing "amazing" about the public record except to this ignorant fool) will not stop the truth from being known.
And I see the same group wants to continue to pretend the idea the AirForce One would be a terrorist target is preposterous. Yet the same types shriek how "Bush Knew" and yelp that "something" should have been done. What absolute creeps.
At least I had to laugh when I read the above. They are still steaming over "The Flight Suit". heheh
Oh yeah, Hollywood, we just know THEY'VE always been a hotbed of RIGHT-WING activist-types. The whole crowd is overwhemingly Bush shrills. < /sarcasm>
The brits also claim Hollywood goes out of its way to make every film villian have a british accent. I don't see where they get that idea either, of course none of these snotty liberal brits have gone ANYWHERE near the source of these American films, go figure.
You mean he didn't stop reading and scream to the kids "My God, a plane has crashed in New York, run for your lives!"?
By the way, where are all the Hollywood movies about a sitting president, like "Air Force One," "An American President," etc. Seemed like there were a bunch of them during the 90's.
NYT articles?
Not to mention that one plane could have just been an accident. It used to be normal for planes to give a buzz past the skyline and a poorly timed heart-attack could cause one crash.
Yes you do. I woke-up between crashes and the first thing I heard was twin-engine commuter(I figured cargo, since right past the Battery was a common flightline).
And if I remember correctly, was there not a report of GWB saying that "that guy must have been a really bad pilot" after the first since there was perfect weather that day(You could see 50 miles easy, I'm 8 miles away as the gull flies across the harbor).
Frum points out that the nation needed a leader, not a demagouge on that day and the days that followed, and that Bush went out of his way to appear solemnn---not vindictive---and determined, but not seething (which, in fact, he was). The first press conference was, by nature, at an airplane hangar and was based on extremely limited information, all the while the SS were trying to get Bush on the plane.
I think we need to tell history accurately, without flourishes from either the idiot writer or the (apparently) overly-enthusiastic screenwriter. Bush behaved exactly as he needed to, and every analyst I've read says that his National Cathedral speech, followed by the SOTU, interspersed with his ad-lib at the WTC site, fixed his place in history. It needs no embellishment from the right, and will be impervious to tainting by the left.
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