Propaganda is propaganda. I have little respect for those who supported one and now condemn another: what’s good for the goose and all that. I’m not much happier with those who condemned the first as propaganda and fiction and now celebrate a more convenient fictionalization.

Both were distributed by Disney (one by Miramax, one by ABC). Both are labelled as docudramas or dramatizations. Both caricature otherwise defensible positions—that President Clinton should have done more to stop particular Islamic terrorists in the eight and a half years between February 26, 1993 and September 11, 2001, including military strikes against those terrorists senior generals; and that President Bush has pursued a number of goals more related to authoritarian control than to defense of America.

Neither is a reasonable basis for a discussion of the course of our nation. Neither is a useful text for national dialogue. They are interesting only as artifacts of our polarized political culture and of the regrettable merger of public-service news and public circuses into that gibbering beast called The Media.

Update: Whoever generated this trailer for 9/11 is presenting it as the “official true story”. It looks like that’s ABC.