This is what happens. . . .

This is what happens when you put aside your blog for a little while:

1) you get your Master's degree finished. I got my Master's degree finished!

2) you procreate. Our new baby girl, Matilda, was born on November 3rd (6 lb., 9 oz, 18 in. long).

Be warned!

Hope to put up a post some time before the end of November. Hope also to learn how to lift cars with my mind before Christmas. A trifle unsure which is less likely.

Hope everyone is doing well.

What "The Path to 9/11" is Paved With

Poor ABC. They try their hardest to do justice to a complex and horrifying historical event--the terror attacks of 9/11. They work night and day to produce a solid finished product. And what happens? Clintonistas bash them to pieces during a time when we should be concentrating on national healing.

And if you believe that little narrative, I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.

The Path to 9/11's "Fair and Balanced" Release Strategy

Of course, a person can hardly be blamed for believing it. After all, ABC originally billed The Path to 9/11, both in its promotional materials and in the press, as "based on the 9/11 Commission Report." Long after ABC changed the show's official status in the US to "docudrama," Network Seven in Australia was still billing it as "the official true story."

And it is certainly true that Clintonistas, as ABC News likes to call them, have bashed this miniseries, often before having actually seen it.* Of course, it is difficult to see a film before it has aired when the network will not provide you with advance copies. As late as September 6, Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger all had yet to receive advance copies--though Rush Limbaugh had no trouble getting his hands on one, extolling it on the September 5 edition of his radio show. And neither, oddly enough, did small-time right-wing blogger Patterico. Considering that the film apportions a heavy share of the blame for 9/11 to Clinton, Albright, and Berger--and none at all to Limbaugh or Patterico--this is a bit puzzling.

Not that this release strategy worked particularly well for ABC. In addition to various Clinton officials and Congressional Democrats, conservatives like John Podhoretz, FOX News's Chris Wallace, Bill Bennett, Brent Bozell, Bill O'Reilly, and even Richard Miniter have all publicly expressed concern about the way this miniseries plays fast and loose with the facts. Yes, that Bill O'Reilly. Yes, that Richard Miniter.

And I haven't even mentioned the journalists and 9/11 Commission members (Jamie Gorelick, Richard Ben-Veniste, Tim Roemer, and Bob Kerrey) who have taken issue with the film's portrayal of the events leading up to that day.

So how badly does this film get its facts wrong?

Path to 9/11's FOX-y Revisionism

The answer is, pretty damn badly:

• Madeleine Albright's name is not spelled Madeline. I know it's hard for red-blooded, patriotic Americans to spell the Frenchified names of limousine liberals, but come on!
• Terrorist Mohammed Atta should have been stopped by a U.S. Airways employee for a search, but was not. In the film, the blame is shifted to an American Airlines employee. Oddly enough, American Airlines has threatened to sue and to withdraw advertising from ABC (props to Americablog for the link). How much did ABC spend on this picture?
• On the miniseries's second night, a CIA operative says that "ever since the Washington Post disclosed that we intercepted his calls, [Osama bin Laden] stopped using phones altogether." Because of this, the film argues, the hunt for bin Laden was made more difficult. However, it was not the Post which first reported this, but the ultra-conservative Washington Times (how much did they spend on this movie?). None of this really matters, however, since the interception of bin Laden's phone calls had already been made public (by the even more conservative Taliban) well before the Times's August, 1998 report.

But perhaps the film's worst factual inaccuracies come from its attempt to portray the Clinton administration as being single-handedly responsible for allowing the September 11 terrorist attacks to occur.

In one scene, troops on the ground in Afghanistan have surrounded bin Laden and are closing in for the kill. National Security Advisor Samuel Berger dithers, hems, and haws when asked for the order to finish the job. Finally, bin Laden gets away. Needless to say, no such incident ever took place.

In another scene, Madeleine Albright foolishly warns Pakistan about a missile attack against Afghanistan which is intended to wipe out bin Laden. Even though CIA Director George Tenet warns her not to do this, the stupid cow does it anyway--and bin Laden gets away again. In real life, it was a senior member of the Joint Chiefs of staff who warned Pakistan, so they would not think that the missiles were coming from India. I guess Maddallin AllBrite (sp?) wasn't such a stupid cow after all.

And so on and so forth. And then some more.

The Politics of Path to 9/11

I hope I've made my case that The Path to 9/11 is unvarnished propaganda straight from the horse's ass, put out less than sixty days before one of the most hotly contested midterm elections in American history in the hopes that gullible voters will come back to the (questionable) view that national security is what Republicans, and not Democrats, are good at. I think that Americablog puts it best: "I cannot think of a greater libel than to tell millions of people worldwide that you [sic] are responsible for Osama bin Laden not being stopped before September 11. Disney/ABC just put the blood of 3,000 Americans on Sandy Berger's hands."

But, as Columbo might say, there's just one thing that still puzzles me: why would Thomas H. Kean, the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, stand behind such transparently obvious horse pucky when he would be in the best possible position to see its many falsehoods and distortions? If you want credibility for a show about 9/11, it's hard to imagine a better way to get it than to have him on board.

Well, maybe--and this is just a theory--maybe Kean backed Path to 9/11 because his son, Thomas H. Kean, Jr., is running for a Senate seat in New Jersey this November. Against a Democrat named Bob Menendez. Who has been backed in his campaigning by none other than William Jefferson "I caused 9/11" Clinton.

Or maybe Kean is just a halfwit. I could see it either way.

I hate it when this kind of thing happens. I can't remember a time when this country was more divided by idiotic squabbling and bullshit. We know very well who caused 9/11. Terrorists. Not Bill Clinton, not George Bush, not Michael Moore. Terrorists. Are terrorists more happy or less happy when we squabble amongst ourselves like schoolchildren? Are they more happy or less happy when we work resolutely and in a bipartisan way towards the elimination of terrorist threats and the improvement of our nation's security? Are they more happy or less happy when our leaders and our journalists mislead us into ways of thinking and acting which have no effect on their demonic and homicidal operations?

Don't worry. This type of nonsense will happen again. There will be other "docudramas," other "official true stories," other "Paths to 9/11" thrown at us in this election season, and the next, and the next.

All we can do is work against them.

And avoid, somehow, with God's help, becoming vituperative partisan hacks in the process.**

_______________________________________________________________

*ABC's "Clintonistas" story has a revealing history. At first, this story--not editorial, but story--was titled "Clintonistas Claim Foul Over ABC 9/11 Film." I know this because I saw the title myself on September 9, because this is how the title still sometimes appears in Google search results, and because this title also appears in stories by both Democratic Underground and Daily Kos. Now ABC has changed the title to "Clintonistas Decry ABC Entertainment 9/11 Film." The word "Entertainment" appears so that you'll realize that ABC News had nothing to do with the film--indeed, according to the Internet Movie Database's September 11th story, ABC News has taken Path to pieces. The change from "Claim Foul" to "Decry" is apparently an attempt to soften the obvious bias in the title so that the piece is more in keeping with ABC's high standards of journalistic integrity. I have been told, by the way, that the term "Clintonistas" is a Rush Limbaugh coinage.

** I would like to thank the many progressive blogs which provided information and inspiration for this post, and which also performed their watchdog function to a T. These include: Media Matters, Huffington Post, ThinkProgress, Crooks and Liars, AmericaBlog, and FireDogLake. Kudos, and thank you.

"Mommy, why is that blogger crying?"

My readership is small, but faithful, and your comments often cheer me up when I would otherwise feel blue.

For this reason, I am especially sad at having to make the following announcement.

Due to a mild family emergency (everything is okay now, thank goodness), I have not been able to provide you with an entry this week. I will have an entry this coming Saturday on ABC's atrocious misinfomentary "The Path to 9/11" and it will be what I like to call a Hum-Dinger. After this, I will need to take a sabbatical, a vacation, a rest.

I had hoped that I would be able to do my blog, interact with my family, teach my four composition courses, and also prepare for my Master's exams, but this is simply not possible. For this reason, I will lay down my, er, keyboard and hopefully pick it up again on or about February 15, 2007. In the meantime, I hope to provide occasional updates on persons whom I think will be reincarnated as tapeworms (e.g., John Stossel, David Horowitz) as well as issues which are important to me (e.g., preventing radical conservatives from co-opting Christianity for free-market-fundamentalist purposes). These entries will, however, not be as regular or as dense as they have been in the past. Furthermore, checking this blog monthly, instead of weekly, should be quite sufficient to avoid missing any exciting new developments.

I'll see you this Saturday for one last orgy of information, and after that, I leave you in the capable hands of other bloggers. Don't cry, children! It's only for a couple of months! I have two testicles, and I only need one of them! He ain't heavy, he's my brother! Win one for the Gipper! Run, Forrest, run! Bwaa-hoo-hoo-hoooooooo! (Yes, that's what I sound like when I cry. Awful, isn't it?)

Hope everyone else's semesters are just as hectic as mine, if not worse. Peace.


Daniel Dickson-LaPrade
The Sad Blogger

Mr. Abomination versus the Embryo Cultists

Stumbling to campus with a cup of coffee in my fist, I almost ran right into the sign: "Warning: Genocide Photos Ahead."

Great, I thought, it's gonna be one of those days.

The protest on OU's South Oval was called the Genocide Awareness Project, and it was put on by a rabidly pro-life group called the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR). It consisted of several full-color signs, six by thirteen feet, printed on "aluminum-reinforced, rip-stop vinyl." Each sign showed large, graphic, full-color photographs of lynched African-Americans, Jews murdered during the Holocaust, and, oh yes, aborted fetuses.

When I walked by the protest, I was handed a 32-page, full-color pamphlet written by CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham and titled "Why Abortion is Genocide." (For the text of this pamphlet, see here.) I went to my office, finished my coffee, and took notes on the signs and the pamphlet.

The overall argument of the protest was simple: abortion is state-sponsored, systematic genocide against "the unborn" which is based on the same sort of bigotry that fed southern lynch law and the Holocaust. Don't believe that abortion is systematic? Why, it's "legal through through all 9 months of pregnancy in all 50 states" (p. 2). Don't believe that abortion happens because of hatred against the unborn? Just listen to the way Carl Sagan likens fetuses and embryos--I'm sorry, pre-born children--to newts, segmented worms, and fish: "Dr. Sagan's language was as mean and hateful as that of any racist," Cunningham writes (p. 9). The past tense is important here, since Carl Sagan died in 1996.

A ten-years-dead astrophysicist is the closest they can get to a Goering figure?

The presentation also included a healthy dose of misinformation. One of the signs (mind the graphic images) showed, on the left, an aborted fetus with the caption "Doing this to Your Baby," and on the right, a series of pictures of a mastectomy operation in progress with the caption "Could Do this to Your Breast." Of course, as you can read here, here, and here (and as I have mentioned previously), the scientific consensus is that abortions do not cause an increased risk of breast cancer. But who cares about the truth when our babies are dying?!

Further, the pamphlet breezily asserted that "there is, of course, a consensus in the scientific community that human life begins at the instant a human egg is fertilized by a human sperm" (p. 7). If there were such an instant, human life might begin at it, since neither egg cells nor sperm cells are human. The question, however, is when pershonhood starts. Not to mention the fact that there is no such instant, since conception is a process which takes several hours.

Notes in hand, I marched upstairs to the computer lab and typed out a letter to the school paper's editor. I mentioned Numbers 5:11-31, which seems to show God commanding the Israelites to use an abortifacient in certain circumstances. I mentioned that the herb myrrh is described several times in scripture without any reference to its abortifacient properties. I pointed out that no verse anywhere in the Bible explicitly forbids or condemns the termination of a pregnancy. I asked, if personhood begins at conception, whether identical twins are a single person, since both come from the same fertilized egg. And I pointed out that there is no scientific consensus that personhood begins at the "moment" of conception.

My letter got published under the title "Moral Anti-Abortion Claims Not Founded on Science or Bible" and I received a lot of compliments on it. Things happened, summer came, and I forgot all about my letter.

And then came the anonymous envelope in my English department mailbox from Lake Forest, California.

Some employee of the CBR had sent me the June 2006 issue of their newsletter, the CBR Communique. The entire issue was dedicated to the Genocide Awareness Project's visits to OU and OSU (Oklahoma State University in Stillwater). Inside, two letters to the editor of the OU paper were quoted--and one of them was mine! After quoting three paragraphs of my argument, the CBR had this to say:

"Once again, a pro-abort tried to change the subject (quibbles over the instant
of fertilization versus the day of fertilization have no bearing whatsoever
on our point concerning humanity and abortion) and to confuse the uninformed
(stating the Bible doesn't condemn abortion while ignoring hundreds of
Scriptural admonitions to not murder, to do justice and to take care of
orphans). [Embryos are orphans?] Fortunately, most students probably didn't even read his words, but they will long remember the abortion photos. Scripture has a
warning for this man: 'He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the
righteous, both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD.' "(Prov. 17:15)

Sanctimonious, aren't they? I'm sure glad I'm not sanctimonious like that. The part in italics, by the way, was not underlined or italicized in the original. The thoughtful person who sent me the newsletter underlined those words for me, to help me see that, as the Borg would have it, "resistance is futile."

While we're tossing bits of scripture around, I have a couple. I'm using the New American Standard Bible (with help from BibleGateway.com):

Proverbs 12:22--"Lying lips are an abomination to the LORD, but those who deal faithfully are His delight."

Matthew 7:1-2--"Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you."

Boy, those CBR people are cool. They deserve millions of dollars. I really like John Stossel, too. He deserves happiness and a new razor for Christmas. David Horowitz should get a government-funded helicopter, and a harem, and a pony, and a BB gun. . . .

Is it working yet? I'm really trying, I promise.

"This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. . . ."

Over a sheet of notebook paper and a homemade mocha the other day, I realized that I have enough entry ideas to last me through Valentine's Day 2007. It's so bad I don't know what to cover next: John Stossel's conflict of interest with the Palmer Chitester Fund? NCATE's capitulation to NAS and FIRE over the dreaded phrase "social justice"? The fact that the Treasury Department's own statistics show that Bush's tax cuts won't even pay for 10% of the revenue which they will lose the federal government?

But then I thought that maybe I should have a different kind of entry, an entry that might cheer everybody up. So:

2004 was a banner year for science--and for the fortunes of both progressives and moderate Republicans. This is because 2004 saw the publication of two of the most important science articles of the past hundred years. The first was published in the March 27 issue of the Lancet, and was titled "Breast Cancer and Abortion: Collaborative Reanalysis of Data from 53 Epidemiological Studies, including 83,000 Women with Breast Cancer from 16 Countries." The second was published in the December 3 issue of Science and was titled "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change"--an infinitely sexier title.

Anthropogenic (Human-Caused) Global Warming
The latter article was an analysis by Naomi Orestes of 928 article abstracts from peer-reviewed science journals having to do with the subject of global warming which were published between 1993 and 2003. Of those papers which dealt either directly or indirectly with the causes of global warming, not a single one took issue with the position that recent global warming is caused primarily by human industrial activity. Not one.

No longer could global warming denialists argue that scientists disagreed among themselves about the causes of global warming--not that they really could anyway, after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science all issued statements and/or reports in favor of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (all before 2004). It is, however, one thing to be able to say "Look at all these scientific organizations that are on board with the idea of anthropogenic global warming:" it is quite another to be able to add, as progressives and moderate Republicans can now, "and look at how few journal articles the other side has published!"

The ABC Link
The Lancet article, on the other hand, put the nail in the coffin of the idea that abortion increases a woman's risk for breast cancer. The largest study of its type ever performed, it examined (as the title indicates) 83,000 women with breast cancer (holy cow!) from 16 different countries (holy crap!).

This abortion-breast cancer (or ABC) link is not as preposterous as it sounds: women who take a pregancy to full term have a decreased risk of breast cancer, while rats whose pregnancies are terminated have a higher risk for certain kinds of tumors. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, scientists checked into this possible link--and got wildly varying results. Of course, the ABC link has been used again and again by anti-choicers to argue that abortion is a terrible, dangerous, carcinogenic procedure which ought to be outlawed at once--and, as is so often the case with the far right, the empirical data are really beside the point.

Most of the studies which showed an ABC link involved scientists asking women "Do you have breast cancer?" and "Have you ever had an abortion?" The problem, of course, is that people lie about abortion. Further, it may be the case that women who know that the causes of breast cancer are being investigated and who have breast cancer themselves might be more likely to divulge previous abortions than women with no personal stake in the study--a phenomenon known as response bias. In January 1997, the Danish scientist Mads Melbye and his group published a paper in Epidemiology and Community Health which got rid of the response bias problem: since Denmark records all abortions and also has a national cancer registry, Melbye could get data straight from the horse's mouth--data that included records for 10,246 women with breast cancer. Guess what? No response bias, no ABC link. Oh, and I almost forgot: rats don't have breasts.

But the 2004 study in the Lancet did Melbye et al. one better: it wasn't limited to Denmark (data from 16 different countries were involved), and it dealt with more than eight times the number of breast cancer sufferers. The Lancet study covered 53 previous studies on the ABC link, dividing them into two varieties: the "prospective" kind (data on women was collected before the diagnosis of breast cancer, as it was in the Melbye et al. study, thus removing the response bias problem) and the "retrospective" kind (data was collected only after the women were diagnosed with breast cancer, thus making response bias an issue). Sure enough, the only way to support the ABC link empirically is with retrospective studies. The prospective studies--the ones without response bias issues--showed nothing.

"Onward, Christian Soldiers. . . ."
Yeah, 2004 was pretty good, all right: both the evolution-denying, heterosexist, abstinence-only, anti-abortion social conservatives and the hyper-corporatist, planet-raping, poverty-inducing free-market conservatives took body blows from which they will never fully recover. No, there is no confusion about what causes global warming. No, there is no causal link between abortion and breast cancer.

And the best part? This is only the beginning. As time goes on, more and more studies will come out in support of views held by moderate Republicans and progressives and against those held by the far right. Just as no one any longer believes that "miscegenation" between African Americans and European Americans is a troubling soical problem, it is only a matter of time before far-righters are forced to concede their views, for example, about the rapaciousness, mental illness, and pedophilic tendencies of gays and lesbians--or else concede their credibility.

Of course, there will always be free-market fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists who place personal gain and the idea of a Protestant Police State over the facts and over the needs of those less fortunate, regardless of what Jesus says. However, with each tiny square that can be made impassible to hardline conservative pieces, progressives and moderate Republicans gain a square of their own which allows their own pieces more breathing room. And the more such squares the two non-psychotic sides have, the more debate and bipartisan effort can be used to fix the problems that we face as a culture, as a nation, and as a species.

Update: Happy News on the VNR Front!

You might remember the previous post I did about the fake news/covert propaganda pieces called VNRs (video news releases). Well, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy study on VNRs which I described in that post, the FCC has now sent letters to 77 different television stations "[asking] station managers for information regarding agreements between the stations and the creators of the news releases. The FCC also asked whether there was any 'consideration' given to the stations in return for airing the material." Snap!

The same day that I found out about this on the Huffington post, I also found on the same site that a federal judge had ruled Bush's NSA program of warrantless wiretapping to be unconstitutional. As the judge herself put it, "there are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution." Snap!

Anyway, see you on August 26th with a fresh post.

A Sad Announcement

Unfortunately, summer vacation is almost over. Fortunately, the wife and I will be taking one last vacation before school starts. Unfortunately, these two things together mean that there will be no blog entry this week. Sorry, readers!

But not to worry: I will be back again with a fresh, delicious, and wholesome entry on August the 26th. In the meantime, check out Jim Woodring's blog (link at right), which is awesome, as well as these lovely items from Media Matters for America about what a mendacious jerk David Horowitz is: JERKY JERKY JERKY JERKY JERKY. I hope goats urinate in his herb garden.

Here also is a nice Ann Coulter tidbit: LADY LIBERTY'S TAPEWORM RIDES AGAIN.

See you next Saturday!