XDA

Here is a very instructive piece by Hawkish Cliff May at NRO which includes these forgotten, by me, bits of history:

It’s also important to point out that Novak did not report that Plame had ever worked in a covert capacity. He later told me and others that he had assumed she was merely a desk-bound analyst and, had he been aware she was more than that, he would have steered clear. I believe he was telling the truth. Do Pincus and Leiby think he was lying? I’d ask them to make that clear as well.

So how did the public learn that Plame had been undercover? David Corn revealed that in a story in the leftwing magazine The Nation. I remain convinced that Corn’s unnamed source was Joe Wilson, who had received an award from a group associated with The Nation for — can you guess? — “truth-telling.” Wilson also had written for The Nation, accusing President Bush of having “imperial ambitions.”

[...]

On the silver screen, Plame attempts to exfiltrate Iraqi scientists who know for certain that Saddam has no nuclear-weapons program only to have her CIA handlers shut down her mission. This is pure fiction, but savor the irony: Too many in the CIA worked diligently to undermine President Bush — the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran’s nuclear-weapons program had been halted is only the most infamous example — but in the movie, the CIA protects Bush and betrays Plame.

By the way: As Quin Hillyer pointed out in The American Spectator, Plame’s own memoir suggests she was among the many intelligence analysts — at the CIA and other agencies — who were convinced that Saddam was still developing weapons of mass destruction.

She was in good company: The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with “high confidence” that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program. Former vice president Al Gore and then-senator Hillary Clinton believed that. Senator Ted Kennedy said: “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.”

As for Wilson, prior to the U.S. intervention, he told Dave Marash, then a reporter for ABC News, that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might “use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have.” That was his argument against the war: not that Saddam did not have WMD but that it would be dangerous for American troops to face them.

Fair Game, the film, is not fair. It slanders innocent people caught in a web spun by Joe Wilson to flatter his vanity and that of his wife. But what can you expect from Hollywood?

Here is a video discussion with Lionel Chetwynd and Roger L. Simon. Very sound criticism.

Here are the weekend estimated receipts. Not only did they go down, again, (60% fall off in revenue) but the number of theaters showing it declined as well ( by 35%). Another leftist fantasy bites the dust blown from the trash heap of history.

Labels: Fair Game

Although we won't know until tomorrow, nothing about the box office performance of the lying docu-drama Fair Game these past two weeks indicates that it will expand into new theaters (beyond the 386 it now plays in) today. It has made only $6.3 Million domestically in the four weeks since its limited, rolling release (and a similar amount overseas). That's about half the production budget. The distributors passed on expanding last week due to weak ticket sales, and the only thing that has changed is that more people are complaining about the so-called accuracy of the film, that if fails to include any real screen time to the real life revealers of where Ms. Plame worked, state department undersecretary Richard Armitage and the late Robert Novak. How can you pretend to be factual and ignore the quintessential, albeit inconvenient, facts? Here, here, here and here are more outraged reviews. Money quotes:

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; "Fair Game" is just one more example. But the film's reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth - not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife - the myth endures.

[...]

My old boss Bob Novak reported that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. His original source was Richard Armitage, Bush's deputy secretary of state. Inconveniently for the storyline of "Fair Game" -- and the story the Left pushed for years -- Novak and Armitage both opposed the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

It's hard to argue that two Iraq War opponents got together and decided to punish Wilson for publicly questioning the case for war -- especially when Novak was doing so long before Wilson was. And Armitage was a famous dove, even by State Department standards.

Given Hollywood's bias against subtlety and complexity, the filmmakers had a choice: Lie about Novak and Armitage to make them Iraq hawks -- or simply ignore them. The screenwriters chose the latter. Novak is mentioned only once, at the moment Plame reads the column. Armitage is mentioned only in the text epilogue in the closing credits.

[...]

It's wrong to assert that the disclosure of Mrs. Wilson's identity was part of a malignant effort to hide an even bigger nefarious plot of having "lied us into war." If anything, the Bush White House (including Mr. Libby) was the victim of bad information - information supplied by Mrs. Wilson's incompetent CIA.

UPDATE: The number of theaters showing the film this past weekend went up 40%, to 436 (so much for my prognostication) but revenue went down 37.8% and the movie was 14th for its fifth weekend of release. It will just barely make its money back but its a loser both for its box office disappointment and its alternate reality sense of history. Even the Washington Post criticized the lies at the heart of the movie. Enough said.

Labels: Fair Game

I'm going to try something new, review a movie I haven't seen. "Fair Game" came out last week, on November 5, 2010, in 46 theaters (including two in the Denver area). Because of the failure of nearly all of the America-bashing political and military movies of the last half decade (and the list of these box office failures is long) the decision makers of how Fair Game is distributed have gone for the slow roll out. That is, they put the movie in a few theaters, see how it does, hope for good reviews and word of mouth and, if things pan out, the movie goes to more theaters and eventually to a full release (that is, in more than 2,500 theaters nationwide). In the first weekend, the movie made about $600,000. That ain't so good. The reviews have been OK but generally lukewarm and even the positive ones say the movie is a trifle soulless. Here, at Rotten Tomatoes, is a sampling. The percentage of positive reviews is just below 80%. That's not bad. The average movie viewer's positive feedback is a rather anemic 65%. Whether this movie will buck the recent tradition of Americans boycotting anti-American movies is a long shot and the number of theaters that are playing it today, will tell a lot of the tale. I'll update. [Box Office Mojo reports that the number of theaters showing the film will increase to 175 this Friday. Still a little cautious.]

But I was struck in the reviews, both positive and negative, by how hook-line-and-sinker-like have the reviewers swallowed the false history the movie portrays. Here, at the Daily Caller, is a point by point refutation of the lies the movie holds out as truths. It is a long list. Here is another similar debunking at World Affairs Journal. But, as a counter-example, here is a negative review which says that President Bush said in the famous 16 words in the 2003 state of the nation address that Iraq had bought yellowcake. No. He said sought, which was true. Wilson, when he wasn't misspeaking (lying) about his nepotistic trip to Niger, said he saw no evidence of a sale of yellowcake. No kidding, Sherlock. We never claimed the Iraqis bought the stuff.

I'll have to skip the usual review of the acting, writing, cinematography, etc. as I don't know anything about them. Valerie Plame is played by dead ringer Naomi Watts, an English born Aussie actress I quite like and have since her early role in Flirting. Sean Penn, while not actually visually similar to Joe Wilson, is also a good choice as a blustery fellow with no clue (how else to explain Penn's enthusiastic support for the petty tyrant Hugo Chavez?) The director is Doug Liman who did the good Swingers and Go, the probably OK The Bourne Identity and the horrible Mr. & Mrs. Smith and Jumper. He seems to think he has made a movie showing the truth. He's wrong.

The real problem with the making of the movie is that it's about 2 years too late. President Bush is no longer our president. The war in Iraq has been a success, for now (the future is cloudy). A Hitler like tyrant was removed from office and executed and 26 Million freed from a murderous and debilitating tyranny. There will never be a resuscitation of Sadam's weapons programs nor will Baghdad again be the retirement home of the world's worst terrorists. All good things, I think. The best thing of Gulf War II was that we took on an al Qaeda franchise and defeated it soundly. We proved the strong horse there. Al Qaeda still exists but its myrmidons are not mounting the sort of attacks they were capable of 10 years ago.

Oh, and there's this. Scooter Libby did not 'out' Valerie Plame as an analyst for the CIA; Richard Armitage told the late Robert Novak where she worked and Novak published that information. Neither Armitage nor Novak supported the invasion of Iraq. Neither Novak nor Armitage were willing to carry the White House's water. The idea that a Bush administration member (Scooter doing Dick Cheney's bidding) told people where Ms. Plame worked in retaliation for Joe Wilson's NYT piece attacking the White House regarding WMD intelligence, although well ingrained in the public consciousness (as evidenced above), is just not true. That inconvenient fact would seem a problem for a wrenched-from-6 year-old-headlines, true story of the supposed dirty deeds our government is capable of.

The one question I have is why were neither Dick Armitage nor Robert Novak prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act for revealing where Valerie Plame worked? Now there's a story worth researching; and it would probably make a movie just as exciting and fulfilling as Fair Game.

UPDATE: According to Box Office Mojo for Friday, 11/19/10, Fair Game, in over 350 theaters now, broke the top ten (tenth) and has taken in nearly 2 million of the 22 million it cost to make this lying docudrama. I guess that's according to plan, but something tells me this sort of box office receipts will fail to make anyone, who backed this pre-Thanksgiving turkey, rich. I could have told them that years ago.

Labels: Fair Game