Bill-O the Clown is calling to execute the guys who leaked the recent diplomatic cables as ‘traitors.’ How about a fair balance, Bill-O? We’ll execute the cable leakers provided we also execute all the guys who were behind the exposure of Valerie Plame (and thereby exposing all her undercover contacts and other agents)? Yep, I’ll looking at you Dick Cheney!
The Huffington Post , among other sources, reported a couple of days ago that
“Fair Game,” the film about former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson and the Bush administration’s leaks about her identity, is set to premiere May 20 at the Cannes Film Festival.
Naomi Watts and Sean Penn play Plame Wilson and her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Doug Liman, the producer behind the Bourne franchise, directed “Fair Game.”
Based on Plame’s 2007 memoirs “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” “Fair Game” is the only U.S. film in the running for the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.
The film’s trailer hasn’t made it online, but the clip below was posted to the festival’s web site.
The clip (posted above), though, raises questions about just how faithful the adaptation was. As summarized by Greg Mitchell for the Nation:
It finds the couple–Naomi Watts and Sean Penn–in a playground with their kids running about, as Penn angrily confronts his wife over what he has just learned: that she may have written something that got him “sent” to Africa on that famous uranium fact-seeking mission related to Iraq WMD.
In the scene, she denies that she did that as he claims that if this gets out his career is ruined, and asks her to speak out. She suggests that maybe he did not think of his family first when he wrote that New York Times op-ed that drew so much attention…
Curiously, I don’t remember any of those moments being recounted in either Valerie or Joseph Wilson’s memoirs (on page 139 of her book, Valerie writes, “at no time did Joe or I ever consider that my cover and work at the CIA would be compromised by the submission of the op-ed“) — but they do happen to be exactly in line with common, if false, Republican talking points during the controversy:
As many people, including Joseph Wilson, noted repeatedly during the past few years, these assumptions are absolute nonsense. Why on earth would Valerie Plame Wilson think it would help her husband’s business to send him on an unpaid trip (except for reimbursing his expenses) to beautiful, scenic the bleak desert of Niger? And how was Joe Wilson’s consulting business somehow dependent on a trip that he didn’t talk about until it was revealed in news reports a year and a half later?
Similiarly, as Plame herself notes in passing in her book (see the quote above), the idea that a career CIA officer working on vital nuclear-security issues would be exposed by her own government for the meager purpose of political retaliation was utterly unthinkable to most people… except, unfortunately, the cutthroat, politics-is-everything sociopaths who populated the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney White House (and their unquestioning acolytes).
Or, I guess, the amoral denizens of Hollywood studios, who are more interested in emotionally-driven conflict than accuracy. As Fair Game’s director, Doug Liman (known previously for The Bourne Identity), said in an interview, the focus of the Plame movie was “story and character, and not… politics.” And I can see why people in “the industry” might prefer a story about a CIA spy who secretly tries to help her husband’s career, but is inadvertently exposed by his media self-promotion, to the less combative, politically correct truth.
Besides, Valerie Plame Wilson herself is going to Cannes to promote the film, so I guess she and her husband have made their peace with whatever factual detours Liman & Co. may have taken in adapting their autobiographical accounts. But maybe the need to accept personally insulting, false narratives just for the sake of getting their story told in some form is the depressing moral here… the Republicans make up a bogus version of events out of thin air, and it winds up being perpetuated because it serves the interests of certain moneyed factions (like Hollywood film backers) more than the actual truth does.
And everyone else has no choice but to accept it, and make the best of things. And so it goes.
I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’ Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.
After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy. Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.
9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror. They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.
The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.
In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’ Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.
Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more. The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains. The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’
Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.
Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.
Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.
First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror. It’s impossible. It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents. Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.
Terrorists come in many flavors. Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists. No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear. This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!
I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.
This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists. Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there. Ergo – stalement.
How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again? It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground. And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global? There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.
Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy. And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog. Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds. Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.
Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs - and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.