9/11 and The Reagans

Someone besides me noticed the parallel between the CBS miniseries, The Reagans, that got cancelled and shunted aside to cable, and the current controversy over the ABC "docudrama," The Path to 9/11, that blames the Democrats for everything (criticism of the docudrama here).

Of course, it's a little dangerous to say the people you oppose are hypocritical in supporting one thing and opposing the other when you do the exact opposite, and that's been noted also (by crazy libertarians, of all people).

I think there are some grounds for making a distinction though. The Reagans was to be shown in a non-election year, not two months before an election. The issues there weren't as directly relevant to who should win the election. And ABC's defense, more or less that "it's not a documentary, so it doesn't have to be accurate" doesn't cut it when ABC is shipping 100,000 free DVDs to schoolteachers to try and influence the public perception of what happened.

Despite all that, I'm not quite as exercised as many others are over this. The program should end before mid-October, they shouldn't confuse schoolkids with fiction, they should plaster the beginning and ending with disclaimers, and they should run an equivalent docudrama that's slanted toward the truth - Clinton didn't do enough to stop 9/11, while Bush did significantly worse.