Leni Riefenstahl trades up

Trapped on the other side of the country aboard Air Force One, the President has lost his cool: "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!"

His Secret Service chief seems taken aback. "But Mr. President . . ."

The President brusquely interrupts him. "Try Commander-in-Chief. Whose present command is: Take the President home!"

Was this George W. Bush's moment of resolve on Sept. 11, 2001? Well, not exactly. Actually, the scene took place this month, on a Toronto sound stage.

The histrionics, filmed for a two-hour television movie to be broadcast this September, are as close as you can get to an official White House account of its activities at the outset of the war on terrorism.

Written and produced by a White House insider with the close co-operation of Mr. Bush and his top officials, the movie The Big Dance represents an unusually close merger of Washington's ambitions with the Hollywood entertainment machinery.

A copy of the script obtained by The Globe and Mail reveals a prime-time drama starring a nearly infallible, heroic president with little or no dissension in his ranks and a penchant for delivering articulate, stirring, off-the-cuff addresses to colleagues.


Story here

The movie, tentatively titled, "The Big Dance," hits the cable network Showtime this fall (I'm guessing sometime on Sept. 11, or during the upcoming war with Iran).

Say what you will about the Bush White House, they love making little images in their workshop (ironically, the film is being made in Canada, a country we have occasional problems with. If it isn't a trade dispute, it's that pesky legalization of pot. If it isn't pot, it's forgetting to thank them for help after Sept. 11. And, heck, those northerners speak French, right? Well, heck, I knew something was wrong with them). And they have absolutely no fear when it comes to promoting their memory of events even though investigations by Congress into the massive intelligence failures relating to the terrorist attack tends to get, well, pushed off the table when the tough questions come up.

There's something vile yet funny about this whole film, something icy and infected that crawls into the pit of your stomach when you try to laugh off this sanctioned version of history that's more of a polish job than a document of truth. The article points out that there are differing accounts of exactly what Bush did on a western-bound Air Force One while cities were burning on the east. Even the film's writer admits he's trying to make Bush look good, which is where the queasiness comes in.

Your casual cynic would debase the film as yet another ploy to get Bush into the White House in '04. Personally, I'm left with the dread that there is something deeper going on. Bush's team is essentially making a pre-emptive strike against history books that haven't been written yet. In their hearts, they know they were an administration caught with their pants down when the terrorists struck, and that public consciousness still sees their president winging it away when the nation needed him the most. After all, people in New York City couldn't hop on a plane and fly west, unlike Bush. Instead, they got to be covered with the ashes of collapsed buildings and burned city dwellers. This film, this propaganda puppet show, is telling a lot more than its carefully scripted edifice is wants to. This film wouldn't have been made if Team Bush wasn't scared witless that the people are waking up, through the likes of Howard Zinn and Michael Moore, that Bush left America in a lurch when it suffered a horrendous attack. New York was smoldering, a side of the Pentagon was in rubble, and a field in Pennsylvania became a grassy mass grave.

Make no mistake. This is a fiction. The fact it needs to be made and aired before Election Day 2004 speaks volumes. It's a phantom, an illusion, a hologram made to entice taxpayers to vote for the sequel. It's a sick display of partisan brainwashing, so much energy being poured into making a hollow boy a rootin'-tootin' cowboy-warrior king. If this was happening in any other country, we'd be making comparisons to how Hitler hired film maker Leni Riefenstahl to create a more friendly image of Nazi Germany to the rest of the world. A docudrama starring an avatar of a sitting president is something we'd expect North Korea of Cuba would do.

Thank heaven for small favors. They at least had the tact to not film at New York's Ground Zero or in the field in Pennsylvania. But then again, filming on U.S. soil would at least pump some money into local economies. Instead, they're spending Canadian tax dollars to make their lies into film.

God Bless America.