When We Officially Started Bragging of Sponsoring Darkness

Having had enough (see prior post), I plugged into PBS' "Frontline" show tonight. I'm not sure I ever purposely watched this program before. Based on the trailers, at least one of my contacts noted they didn't want to hear more. But what I saw was pretty gripping. Little really new information I suppose for those of us who have found current events tending to monopolize our reading. But it was a reminder of what television occasionally used to do in disseminating vital information well beyond the limited community of those aggressive knowledge-hunters who track down and actively manage their own education. Of course this was before marketing, sex appeal, and neuroses over market share came to exclude informing the citizenry from the stage. Not the sort of thing the networks bring us anymore, that's for sure (with few and brief exceptions).

This is the sort of cheerleading that caused me to rearrange my evening to where a normal 10PM post is still fermenting at 12:30PM (but worth it!):

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Sam Allis writes in a Boston Globe review: " 'Frontline' delivers a devastating look tonight at the efforts of Vice President Dick Cheney to gain control of the war on terror after 9/11. In doing so, the show purports, he compromised the integrity of America's intelligence system. . . .

" 'Frontline' chronicles the brutal campaign by two consummate political in-fighters -- Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- to decimate the CIA, politically emasculate Secretary of State Colin Powell, and construct a near-limitless concept of executive power during war. While many of these strands are familiar, they have not been assembled as effectively before on television to present a coherent picture of what happened after 9/11."

David Bianculli writes in the New York Daily News: "Simply by underlining in red the names of Cheney loyalists on the organizational flow chart of the George W. Bush administration, 'The Dark Side' shows how deep Cheney's influence stretches."

Glenn Garvin writes in the Miami Herald: "Precisely because it avoids looney-tune conspiracy theories about Halliburton and oil pipelines, and stays away from name-calling in favor of old-fashioned journalism, Frontline presents a powerful indictment of the White House's decision to go to war."

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I hope you had or will have the opportunity to screen this - it was a very well-done 90 minutes. Not nearly as polemical as I would have liked, but perhaps that is just as well, in the interests of keeping those with some embarrassingly bad recent voting choices to answer for still nibbling at the bait. If only it came on in prime time instead of at 10PM!

However, there was at least one mini-revelation for me involving the disgusting award given to George "fall on the sword" Tenet (more and more now to me a full anti-patriot only a couple short notches below the powers that be in terms of criminality and actions traitorous to our nation's primary founding principles). The occasion on which Bush awarded Tenet the highest civilian honor, namely the Presidential Medal of Freedom, also involved award of the same to Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer. What a remarkably uniform band of dysfunctional, anti-democracy, representative-government-and-honesty-bedamned blackguards! Couldn't we have varied the seasoning mix with at least a weak-spined-but-well-intentioned Powell or other minor semi-competent diplomat?