Liars and Knaves

Clinton blasts 9/11 film, amid report of changes
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former President Bill Clinton called for ABC to "tell the truth" in an upcoming miniseries about the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

Senior officials and advisers in Clinton's administration have attacked the accuracy of "The Path to 9/11," accusing filmmakers of including "fictitious" and even "false and defamatory" scenes of how they responded to the terror threat.

"I think they ought to tell the truth, particularly if they're going to claim it's based on the 9/11 commission's report," Clinton told reporters in Arkansas on Thursday.

"They shouldn't have scenes that are directly contradictory to the factual findings of the 9/11 commission. I just want people to tell the truth."

[...]

They called the project "a fictitious rewriting of history" and urged it be shelved until "egregious factual errors" could be fixed.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have also joined in calling reported details of key scenes false and misleading.

Bill Clinton yowling plaintively for truth? His fellow Democrats demanding truth? How rigid, how low brow, how old fashioned. I won't even go into Clinton's personal relationship with the concept of truth, except to note that even here he wants truth, not for the sake of truth (he knows that would be ridiculous), but "particularly" because of the circumstances. In other words its quite alright to lie, as he did repeatedly during his presidency, but not in cases with circumstances which warrant the truth.

What I do think worth noting however is the irony of Democratic leaders calling for truth. These are the people whose idea of truth is to claim they knew all along that Iraq would be a "quagmire", and insulted our allies by calling Enduring Freedom "unilateral" even though they originally claimed almost unanimously that Iraq needed invading. These are the people who now claim Bush "lied" about weapons of mass destruction, even though they propagated exactly the same "lie", based on exactly the same information, before we found out the weapons weren't there. These are the peddlers of the lie that Bush "stole" not one but two elections; the people who stood by tongue in cheek while their less brainy minions accused Bush of either "orchestrating" 911 or neglecting the country during the six months he was in office prior to 911. For these liars and knaves to cry crocodile tears over an alleged untruth is the very height of hypocrisy. Its just rather disgusting.