Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

Penn didn’t simply jump the shark with Fair Game, he looks to have gone full-Fonzi with a jacket and shades. Sadly, such a lack of integrity and appreciation for truth isn’t limited to Hollywood these days. Lies, like mistakes, reverberate and should have consequences when they are this dishonest and glaring. But don’t look for a currently mostly liberal Washington to hold Penn, or Hollywood, to account for what amounts to blatant dishonesty when it comes to America’s recent political history.

Fair Game isn’t truth, or history, it isn’t even an exercise in mild revisionism. It’s the perpetuation of a Big Lie more suitable for a Politburo, than a Hollywood studio. Hopefully there are still enough Americans grounded in reality to know that Penn’s latest endeavor in agitprop doesn’t belong under some allegedly big political tent spanning from Hollywood to DC. Given the Post’s editorial, Fair Game has more in common with a Pee Wee Herman big adventure, than anything reality-based, or the least bit politically truthful. 

“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

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.

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“Fair Game” is based on a book written by Plame and former ambassador Wilson. It begins by introducing Plame, a CIA operative, who is on a secret mission in Kuala Lampur. She eventually returns home to her husband and the two spend an evening out to dinner with their friends. Her friends don’t know that Plame is working for the CIA and the couple want to keep it that way.

According to the film, the Vice President’s office soon requests that someone should travel to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from that country. At the time, the Bush administration was reviewing intelligence reports about Iraq’s leader and the threat that he posed to the United States. Plame supports sending her husband to Niger to investigate the reports. After his trip, Wilson returns to the United States and reports that a sale of uranium didn’t occur.

To publicize his discovery and to undermine President Bush’s rhetoric about the threat that Hussein posed, Wilson submits a column to the New York Times. In the article, he notes that such a deal had not occurred. The publication of that article occurs halfway through “Fair Game” and the rest of the story focuses on the war that the Bush administration waged against Wilson and his wife, whose identity was eventually leaked to columnist Robert Novak. The filmmakers argue that the Bush administration orchestrated the leak and sought to undercut the credibility of Wilson and Plame.

Unfortunately, many of the arguments in the film are undermined by the facts. Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state, was the real source who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity to Novak. That simple undeniable fact is seen in the scroll at the very end of “Fair Game.” As John Nolte noted in his review of the film, a damning Washington Post editorial clarified many of  the allegations that are presented in “Fair Game.” The liberal newspaper’s editorial  noted:

One of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House — that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson — is untrue.” The editorial later noted that “it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson.

These ideas have no place in “Fair Game,” a story that targets the truth as much as it targets the Bush White House.

Naomi Watts does a great job in her role as Valerie Plame. Despite the liberties taken in the story, Watts shows vulnerability as a woman whose life changed forever when her identity was publicly revealed. However, most of the other characters in the story are one-dimensional. For instance, Joe Wilson is “indignant” during many of his scenes. At a dinner party with his friends. Meeting a critic of his wife’s. At home. He’s always angry about something and many of his scenes end with him getting aggravated. On the other side of the aisle, Karl Rove is portrayed as “calculating” and Scooter Libby is “manipulative.” These characters are simple caricatures of what the filmmakers think these people are like.

“Fair Game” is a disappointing movie on many different levels. From the film’s shaky camerawork to the simplification of the characters to the lifeless story, “Fair Game” tells a one-sided account about the leak of an operative’s name.

This movie isn’t fair but more importantly, it isn’t well done either.

Liman introduces Plame as a Jack Ryanette, a CIA field agent undercover in the big bad Middle East muscling bad guys, recruiting spies, and at the center of much of the activity involving the pre-Iraq War intelligence gathering  with respect to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. Her husband, a former diplomat with extensive experience in Iraq and Africa, runs some sort of international business out of the couple’s lovely home with two young children constantly underfoot.

As part of the case for war, the CIA and the White House are both eager to verify a British intelligence report (that the British stand by to this day) that claims Saddam sought the purchase of enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Because of Wilson’s experience and contacts, Plame is asked by her superior to draft something up explaining why her husband would be qualified to go to Niger and report back on the lay of the land. She does, and in 2002 Wilson goes and finds no evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping.  Afterwards, in his State of the Union, President Bush uses those now famous 16 words that seem to contradict Wilson’s report and in turn Wilson decides to go public with a New York Times op-ed that essentially claims the president knowingly lied.

According to the film, what follows is that the White house — specifically Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby (who has the only memorable scene in the film) and Karl Rove — set out to destroy Wilson’s credibility by leaking to columnist Robert Novak that his CIA Operative wife got him the Niger gig, which effectively blows Plame’s cover to everyone from her closest friends to the many field operatives she handles throughout the world. The human toll is both on her marriage and in putting those she’s worked with in Iraq in mortal danger.

In the vacuum of a straight-forward film, the first half of “Fair Game” actually works quite well. The various dynamics involving Plame’s field operations, the tensions between the White House and the CIA, and Wilson’s personal struggle to not feel like a nanny as his wife globe-trots into the center of real-time history makes for a compelling story. Once Plame is outed, though,  the whole structure collapses into Lifetime Movie melodrama, speechifying, a mind-numbing amount of exposition, and of course a dizzying array of lies, both big and small.

Rove passes something sinister to Libby…

Liman’s first Big Lie is also the most comical. Despite all the sinister White House doings Liman puts on display, it is just a fact that no one at the White House leaked Plame’s name to Novak or to anyone else. That information came to the late columnist through Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in the form of offhand gossip. Armitage was not only no fan of the Iraq War, he was frequently and publicly at odds with the Bush White House over it.

Regardless of this well-known fact, at no time does Liman tell his audience this…  until after the final fade with a short paragraph that finally identifies the leaker as Armitage and effectively undercuts all the sinister goings on that came before. Imagine “All the President’s Men” ending with the acknowledgement that all the president’s men had no knowledge of the Watergate cover up. Then, in a laughable attempt to salvage what little is left of the film’s credibility, Liman adds a second paragraph informing us that Armitage learned of Plame’s identity through a White House memo — as though that means a goddamn thing.  

Liman’s second Big Lie is one of omission. It is yet another fact that Wilson’s repeated assertion that his wife didn’t recommend him for the Niger job is a lie, as were his repeated statements claiming he had thoroughly discredited all claims of Saddam seeking uranium from Niger. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe those famous Bush-lovers over at the Washington Post:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

“Fair Game’s” plot might be simplistic and melodramatic, but if Oliver Stone’s taught us anything it’s that facts don’t matter when it comes to telling a compelling story. At its core this is a movie about the relationship between Plame and Wilson. So in order for the film to work, we have to be emotionally invested in these characters, believe in the turmoil they’re going through as a couple, and be rooting for them to find a way to stay together. If we don’t believe, nothing works, but because Liman just can’t stop lying, he destroys this element — the only one that matters — by refusing to deal with the Vanity Fair elephant in the room.

The film that will now be known as “The Good Fair Game’”

The signature moment of the this entire non-scandal/story was Wilson and Plame’s narcissistic decision to appear (photographs and all) in the January 2004 issue of Vanity Fair. Everyone in the world knows the globe-trotting, undercover, CIA. operative with important ongoing field operations agreed to do this, but in the film when Wilson asks her to, the scene plays out as though this request was the final breaking point in their marriage. She’s appalled he would consider such things and soon after she moves out of the house, divorce is in the air, and the elephant looks directly into the camera and says, “Can you believe this shit?”

Then it gets worse…

Plame’s entire character arc is based on her coming to the realization that her reluctance to publicly fight back against the White House was wrong and that her husband was right all along. In the film’s final reconciliation scene, she comes to this conclusion and makes her teary-eyed confession but only after Libby is indicted (not for leaking Plame’s name but for lying to investigators, which he was likely guilty of), which happened in October of 2005, almost two years after the Vanity Fair spread!

No one’s liberal enough to sit there and believe that the same woman who we all know posed for Vanity Fair is the same woman we’re watching in that scene. And it’s at this moment where the lies, big and small, finally overwhelm even the story’s artistic integrity and topples it all into a smoldering pile of failure where once a monument to liberal wish-fulfillment proudly stood.

ADDED: Be sure to read the Daily Caller’s much more in-depth, wonky, and just plain devastating takedown of “Fair Game’s” serial lies.

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.”

Actually, the problem isn’t that adhering to the facts obscures the truth. The problem is that “overweening literalism” bogs down the storytelling. Bringing a fact-based story to the screen necessitates all sorts of manipulation of messy and inconvenient facts in order to compose a compelling, well-ordered tale: compressing time and events, creating composite characters and/or omitting others, putting imagined dialogue in the mouths of historical figures, etc. The trick, and the goal, is to manage all these creative techniques in a way that might “fudge facts,” as Ms. Hornaday says, but stays faithful to the truth.

She quotes The West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as calling nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread. When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph.” Exactly so, and I believe most audiences do view nonfiction dramas, or docudramas, that way. I believe most people understand that what they’re seeing is not a documentary or an exact record of facts, but an “artist’s rendition” of historical reality. (Even documentaries are not strictly collections of facts, of course; they too are carefully pieced together and shaped to tell an entertaining story from a particular point of view).

About All the President’s Men, which Hornaday says is considered the masterpiece of political drama, she notes that “it barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue – ‘Follow the money’ – was never spoken in real life”:

Contrast this with the Left’s response to the 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which dramatized the chain of events that led to the Islamic attacks of that terrible morning almost exactly nine years ago (a morning the Left would like us to “get over”). As I’ve written about before, and as John Ziegler’s documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 brilliantly depicts, Democrats hallucinated that the $30+ million miniseries was a hit job on the Clinton administration, concocted by a cabal of conservative filmmakers and somehow financed by a non-profit, Christian (gasp!) relief mission.

Without having seen a frame of The Path to 9/11, Democrat pit bulls like Senators Harry Reid and Louise Slaughter went into pre-emptive attack mode to protect their legacy, claiming that the miniseries was a pack of libelous lies, and threatening to pull ABC’s license if the show aired. Meanwhile an internet-fueled smear campaign spearheaded by the unscrupulous character assassin, blogger Max Blumenthal, ramped up a mob mentality among the lonely and the impotent in the blogosphere. Ultimately, Bill Clinton himself boiled over about it in his infamous interview with Chris Wallace.

They pulled out all the stops not only to censor The Path to 9/11, but to bury it, because the Left knows how critical it is to control the “consensus history,” that “usable past” that Ann Hornaday mentioned. In the end, none of their threatened lawsuits materialized, because the miniseries was faithful to the larger truth and they knew it. But the damage had been done – the show aired only once, and it remains unavailable on DVD.

This is the third time I’ve written about Fair Game for Big Hollywood. Why bother to devote so much space to a movie that’s fated for box-office oblivion anyway? Because it’s important to call out the Left’s persistent efforts to establish their ideologically correct narrative when the historical evidence doesn’t conform to it. Facts may be stubborn things, to paraphrase John Adams, but they don’t stop the Hollywood Left from spinning a “larger truth” out of a lie.

Marriage Encounter? Or propaganda?

Anyhoo, Sean Penn dusts off his acting chops — more like jowls these days — to play Joe Wilson, wannabe high rolling diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts), who claims her CIA cover was blown by the Bush White House in an attempt to make Joe Wilson look like a fool for his op-ed in the New York Times that claimed the Bush administration misled Congress and the public on the need for war with Iraq.

But you all know the story. Suffice it to say, there was no conspiracy to “out” her, and it was Richard Armitage, a State Department staffer and noted Bush critic – not Bush chief of staff Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, or Darth Cheney – who casually mentioned her name to the late Robert Novak. The whole incident, which should have been a big fat nothing, turned into a huge political bombshell that dominated the headlines for weeks and months, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, VP Dick Cheney’s assistant of national security, ended up being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Regardless of where you stand on the “he said, she said” aspect of this whole affair, you’ll likely agree that what transpired publicly after Robert Novak’s column that mentioned Plame’s name was published was politically motivated.

So how on earth could a movie about so recent an event in American history that created so much controversy be viewed as anything but political? I mean, who cares about “the episode’s impact on [Wilson's and Plame's] marriage”? In his Sucker Punch squad post about the Fair Game script, BH’s Mark Tapson lays out the narrative:

Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

But if you ask filmmaker Doug Liman, Fair Game is not political, but just an all-around great film:

I think it’s in the spectrum of “It’s a really great movie.” And a lot of other movies that have been about the war or dealt with the war have not been great movies. In fact, they’ve been motivated more by politics than by story, and that’s been a turn-off to audiences. This is sort of the first political movie that’s been made where I feel like the commitment was there from the first moment to story and character, and not to politics. (emphasis mine)

Yeah. Like I said before, who cares about how this affected Plame and Wilson personally? If that was the case, this should have been a Lifetime Television movie of the week, with all the saccharine-like emotion for which those movies are known.

Sean Penn’s attempt at looking like a ”distinguished, older gentleman”

This kind of baloney is about selling a “we hate George Bush and his foreign policy” film to a public that has already turned thumbs-down to other anti-war, anti-Bush movies over the past decade. Face it – Hollywood thinks you’re as dumb as a box of rocks.

Yet a number of reviewers aren’t quite ready to jump on the rebranding bandwagon and are willing to call the movie exactly what it is – some in quite gleeful terms.

Jeffery Wells says it’s one of those films that ”expose[s] right-wing scumbaggery” that gives him an “all-is-right-with-the-world feeling.”

Roger Ebert’s quickie synopsis of the film says little about the trials and tribulations suffered by Plame and Wilson in their marriage as a result of the chaos and focuses on – guess what? – the political aspects of the story.

Pete Hammond of Boxoffice Magazine starts his review this way: “After directing big crowd pleasers like The Bourne Identity and Mr and Mrs. Smith, Doug Liman takes a 180 degree turn in the politically explosive thriller, Fair Game.” He doesn’t exactly make it seem like a chick flick, does he?

Justin Chang of Variety writes:

Following “Green Zone” as another slightly dated attack on the Bush administration’s mishandling of Iraq, “Fair Game” serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama. Doug Liman’s film does a respectably intelligent job of spinning the Valerie Plame affair into a sleek mainstream entertainment that means to rouse one’s patriotic ire and at times stirringly succeeds. But the overall conception feels too streamlined to maximize the impact of leads Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, spelling an uncertain fall B.O. reception by a public that’s proven none too game for topical fare.

And Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter wonders, “Whether moviegoers even today can look at this real-life couple, extremely well-played by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, without the distortion of political beliefs is uncertain.”

I’d take it a step further and say that it’s quite certain anyone who goes to see this movie, right or left, will see it through the distortion of their political beliefs. But what about those who don’t follow politics or even world events (I have a relative who brags about how deliberately uninformed she is about what goes on in the world outside her front door), will they be tempted to see this film because it’s supposedly all about story and character?

We’ll have to wait for the box office receipts come autumn to find out. So good luck to you, Doug Liman — I have the feeling you’re going to need it.

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Ohmydeargawd the acting’s bad, which is the last thing you’d expect from these two. Of course this isn’t their fault. The scene is an embarrassing exposition-a-thon leaving a couple of otherwise solid actors with nothing to do but self-consciously emote conflict. Can’t be easy to pretend you’re listening and truly re-acting  when the dialogue is nothing more than a list of talking points. You do, however, have to admire the way in which director Doug Liman works that handheld camera. For a about half a second you can almost feel an artificial sense of energy and self-importance.

Which begs the question: Why release this scene? You usually put your best foot forward with early footage. Is this as good as it gets? 

“Fair Game” — whose Indian name is “Propaganda Without Armitage” — will premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which is currently underway. Early reports indicate that buckets have sold out throughout France due to the entertainment media’s practice drills in water carrying.

Stay tuned…

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see).

But the thought of bringing Fair Game to a theater near you or anyone else must have the producers quaking in their Kenneth Coles. After all, they’re facing the almost certain prospect of their political thriller going down in flames a là the recent cinematic Hindenburg known as The Green Zone, which many are claiming is the final nail in the coffin of Iraq-war-themed movies. The Plame project is a joint production of Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation Entertainment and Participant Media, which describes itself as focusing on “socially relevant, commercially viable” projects.

I think they need to adjust their focus. Fair Game not only is socially irrelevant to everyone except obsessive Bush-haters, but isn’t commercially viable either, since American moviegoers have rejected Hollywood’s anti-war propaganda over and over again. Actually, “anti-war” is a misnomer, since if the Hollywood Left were truly anti-war, they would denounce the actual aggressors like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas et al. But they’re usually too busy heaping moral condemnation on the U.S. and its allies to protest against real evil in the world.

And the concept of evil is too simplistic anyway for the Hollywood Left, which believes the world is more nuanced than conservatives are capable of comprehending, much less admitting. “There are no bad guys or good guys,” say writer/director Stephan Gaghan and George Clooney about their 2005 movie Syriana, in which Americans are clearly the bad guys and radicalized Muslims are the moral center. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s morally inverted view of the world, in which leftists are pillars of truth and integrity, bad guys are simply misunderstood, and conservatives are utterly Satanic. “Bush lied, people died” – you know, nuance.

This isn’t the place for a thorough re-examination of Plamegate or of the justification for going to war with Iraq, which have been written about exhaustively elsewhere: check out Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors, for example, in which he discusses the scandal and eviscerates the Wilsons in the process, or Party of Defeat, in which David Horowitz and Ben Johnson concisely lay out the reasons for going after Saddam. But in case you didn’t keep up with the mainstream media’s four-year, off-and-on front-page obsession with the Plame scandal, here’s a quick recap:

In 2003, the White House sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead that Iraqi maniac Saddam was trying to purchase fissionable materials from Niger. Wilson reported back that the rumor wasn’t credible; but when the Bush administration proceeded to put forth the suspicion as part of the case for going to war, Wilson wrote a controversial editorial entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the wake of which journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of the war, undermining morale and the war effort, although a Senate investigation ultimately discredited the Wilsons’ accusations.

Not to be dissuaded by the facts, Hollywood is dipping into the well again in Fair Game. My own undercover source deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast (okay, it’s Big Hollywood editor John Nolte and his Whistleblower) has slipped me a copy of the script, written by Jez and John Butterworth. I don’t know whether this is a first draft or the final shooting script or some version in-between, but based on what I’ve read, the movie is more than just a desperate attempt to turn this already overblown scandal into a nail-biting political thriller; Fair Game is a full-out assault on Bush’s “war of choice” and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls “neocon evildoing.” (There’s that nuance again).

Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a “coordinated” coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea. He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to “bury” Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being “fair game” – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).

But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation. In other words, as Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, “the entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.” Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush – the whole criminal pantheon of the Left’s fevered imagination – were not responsible for Plame’s outing (Libby was found guilty, though, of perjuring himself during the investigation). Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Penn and Watts play the Wilsons as a couple whose only character flaws are their unshakeable professional integrity, love of country, and willingness to risk everything to speak truth to power. The script highlights the personal cost to Valerie Plame; even her friends turn on her for the “betrayal” of keeping her CIA job secret. “You lied to me for 20 years,” says her best friend in the script. “Who are you?”

Except that this isn’t what happened. Valerie says in her own autobiography that her close friends, without exception, were generously supportive and understanding, and that even old friends, distant relatives and long-lost acquaintances came out of the woodwork to offer their support. But hey, in fairness, the filmmakers have to ramp up the drama somehow.

Meanwhile, Penn’s worldly-wise Joe Wilson is busy speculating about government lies, fending off vicious “right-wing reporters” and lecturing captive audiences about having fearlessly confronted Saddam himself. “Have you met Saddam?” Wilson snaps at dinner guests casually discussing the Iraqi threat. “Have you looked him in the eye? Did he threaten to kill you? You don’t know Saddam. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Later, Penn/Wilson complains to the press that “those in the Highest Office sought to destroy the career of a public servant to punish me for speaking the truth.” If Penn, an actor who says journalists should be jailed for criticizing Hugo Chavez, can deliver a line like this with conviction, then perhaps he should get another Oscar.

To make sure we get the message that Penn’s Joe Wilson is a true American hero, one character tells him, “You’re a true American hero.” And modest too: “The real heroes,” he replies, ”are in Iraq right now fighting a war which was prosecuted on lies and falsehoods.” He got that half-right – the real heroes are fighting in Iraq (and Afghanistan), not here in the comfort of home undermining the war effort.

The anti-war Bush-bashing (yawn) continues to pile up. While driving Penn/Wilson in a taxi to the White House, a West African immigrant expresses his gratitude at being in the “Land of the Brave, Home of the Free” and out of war-torn Sierra Leone: “Over there we have no truth. Just power. Over here it’s a different world.” Apparently this praise for America wasn’t “nuanced” enough for Penn/Wilson, who tells the driver, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Leave it to an immigrant from an anarchic hellhole to appreciate America’s freedoms, while the comfortable leftist broods about the “threat” of “right-wing reporters” and speechifies about imaginary Republican abuses of power. In a later scene, Valerie’s father tells her, “One day this country is gonna look back on these years, and it’s gonna hang its head. It’s gonna weep. Then it’s gonna stand up straight and walk on.” That “stand up and walk on” bit feels tacked on, considering that the Left seems to think America should be in a perpetual state of shame and apology.

Coincidentally, Valerie Plame Wilson is back on the fringes of the news again, thanks to the release of politico Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. This prompted terrorist sympathizer and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans to attempt to handcuff Rove at a recent book signing, shouting, “Look what you did! You outed a CIA officer! You lied to take us to war!” (Um, if Evans is going to attempt citizen’s arrests of war criminals, perhaps she could start with her associates in the Taliban and Hamas). Rather than just trashing the book with a one-star Amazon.com review, the Wilsons actually released a statement, dismissing Rove’s book as

a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.

Yes, very nuanced. But ultimately it’s hard to see the real-life Wilsons as victims. They ended up as the toast of the elitist, anti-war Left, with a glamorous Vanity Fair spread, a $2.5 million book deal for Valerie, and a feature film glorification starring Hollywood A-listers – albeit a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.

One has to wonder if Sean Penn simply doesn’t care whether this movie does well at the box office – after all, how could he expect it to?  Back when anti-war activist Robert Redford directed the 2007 talky bore Lions for Lambs, it was still possible for Hollywood to delude itself into thinking that America would flock to see such superstars as Redford, Cruise and Streep in a sanctimonious plea for pacifism.

But Lions for Lambs fizzled, as did every other Hollywood attempt to flagellate America for the supposedly pointless waste of Bush’s wars, all the way up to last month’s disastrous The Green Zone. (Meanwhile, the 2006 movie 300, an unabashed celebration of warrior virtues and love of country, has racked up $457 million without a single bankable star). If the American people can’t be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood’s leftist morality tales even by a Bourne-style thriller featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?

Americans aren’t buying it. They simply aren’t the morally unsophisticated, uninformed dullards that a condescending Hollywood believes them to be. Or is that too nuanced for the Hollywood Left to grasp?

Speaking of Congress, although the research isn’t yet complete, the early indicators are that, rumors to the contrary, you can not get swine flu from exposure to Henry Waxman. 

Scientists at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine confirmed that 50 years of research found that, aside from price, there was no nutritional difference between conventionally-grown foodstuffs and the ugly, under-sized items you find in the organic section at the supermarket. 

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy made his name explaining how you could tell if you were a redneck.  I trust you understand that fame and fortune such as he achieved aren’t my motivation.  But merely as a public service, I thought I’d point out how to recognize if you’re a racist.  For instance, if you think that Jesse Jackson is an extortionist; that Al Sharpton is a con man; that Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Van Jones are three of a kind; and that the Black Congressional Caucus, ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, Eric Holder and Barack Hussein Obama, present a clear and present danger to our Republic, you are what passes for a racist in 2009. 

Frankly, I keep waiting for Obama to doff the mufti and start appearing in some nicely tailored uniform for, clearly, the cult of personality has been introduced successfully for the first time ever in our nation’s history.  If you disagree, what would you call that red, white and blue Obama symbol that has pretty much supplanted the presidential seal in the past year?  And outside of such places as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, have you ever seen so many posters and pictures of a national leader? 

Perhaps because I don’t watch very much TV, I’ve only recently become aware of a TV commercial which could easily have been written and produced by the White House, possibly under the auspices of the NEA.  In the commercial, a black deliveryman for Miller High Life shows up in a private box at the race track and confiscates all the beer from the rich white people and then hands the bottles over to the regular folks at the track, all the time muttering that the people who actually paid for the stuff don’t deserve it because they’re “hoity-toity.” 

I realize it’s only a commercial, but if we have redistribution of wealth and health care, can redistribution of brewskis be far behind on that great-come-and-get-it-day? 

Like everyone else, I noticed that in his address to Congress, Obama, who had been insisting all along that there were about 45 million people in America without health insurance, was suddenly, without explanation, referring to 30 million.  It seems to me that if he can miraculously make 15 million people just disappear, all he has to do is give two more speeches to completely eliminate the problem. 

Finally, I recently saw ObamaCare summed up rather succinctly by a picture of an elderly American set adrift on an ice floe.  Of course, knowing David Axelrod, Rahm and Ezekiel Emmanuel, John Holdren, Cass Sunstein and the AARP, as I have come to know them, I’m sure they’ll find a swell way to sell it to us.  My guess is that they’ll simply call their final solution to the problem of all those pesky old folks wanting medical attention Obama’s Magical Ocean Cruises.

She is already on record as believing that anyone who does not worship at the Church of Radical Leftism is a “straight up racist.” Beside not understanding the English translation of her argot “straight up,” I am sure that anyone who is even a little bit clear headed can imagine a world where people who thought Condi was dandy and helped Michael Steele get to the helm of the GOP might not take race as the deciding factor with Obama. Be that as it may, Ms. Garofalo assured us that not only were right-wingers racists, but the GOP has been the bastion of White Supremacy since the 1950’s.

Keeping in mind one of the favorite saying of my friend Larry Elder, “Facts are like kryptonite to toe-tag liberals.” (Mr. Elder defines liberals as “toe-tag” if they believe in government intrusion in our lives from birth until they put the tag on your toe in the morgue.) I will present a few facts to try to bring Janeane back into the real world.

***

President Eisenhower backed and signed the first two pieces of significant civil rights legislation in America in 1956 and 1960. He also appointed Republican judges in the south who moved Brown vs. The Board of Education to the Supreme Court. President Eisenhower was… say it with me… A Republican.

The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was back by 82% of Republicans in Congress while only 62 % of Democrats supported the measure. Opposition to the bill was led by Robert Byrd… Democrat! These other well know Senators also voted against the bill: Albert Gore Sr., William Fulbright, Richard Russell, and James Eastland–all Democrats! Two other well know historical figures were prominent in the segregation movement: George Wallace and Orval Faubus, both tried to block black students from attending “white” schools, both were Democrats. It is also interesting to note that both Faubus and Fulbright were counted as mentors by… anyone? William J. Clinton, who I believe was also a Democrat.

***

David Letterman is a total scumbag, who would have thought it! Seems Dave has been having sex with the help over at CBS. I wonder if CBS will make him sit through some sensitivity training on sexual harassment. Here is another surprise, Dave is just another progressive who talks one game and plays another. I am glad to see he has some morality, when a guy who knew what he was up to tried to blackmail him he drew a line in the sand. At least we know what he really cares about–his money.

Whoopi Goldberg also gave us a lesson in Hollywood morality last week when she defended pedophile and child pornographer Roman Polanski: “It wasn’t rape-rape,” she said on The View commenting about the capture of the Polish film director. Seems thinks its okay to: A) Drug a 13-year-old and then have sex with her, and B) After you’re convicted, skip bail and flaunt your lifestyle in Europe.

What’s more, he wants to return to the US for the same reason David Letterman fessed up: America is where the money is and Polanski wants more that he can make in socialist Europe. He has been trying to get his conviction overturned and recently had one of his lawyers claim that even the LA court didn’t care that he had skipped. Wrong!

Bigwig producer Harvey Weinstein put out a petition to support Mr. Polanski which was signed by moral pillar Woody Allen. Maybe he is trying to get O.J., Robert Blake and Phil Spector to sign too!

***

Finally, a last word about Congressman Joe Wilson. In case you have been in a coma for the last month, Wilson yelled “you lie!” at the President during a speech to a joint session of Congress. Congressman Wilson apologized, as he should have, more than a few times for being rude and breaking the decorum of the House. A lot of folks got on him for being uncivil, but I don’t think anyone said he was wrong. In fact, last week Democrats blocked language which would have codified the pledge by Obama that his health care plan would not be open to illegals. Things that make you go Hummmmm…

During Obama’s 400th speech defending his plans to reform healthcare the president responded to charges that the proposals before congress would provide healthcare for illegal immigrants. The President called the charges false whereupon Wilson forgot his home training (or lost his mind) and called the President a liar.

As it happens, similar words were falling from my own lips at that very same moment. I think most people recognize that a private citizen calling the President a liar in the privacy of their living rooms is rather a different animal from elected officials doing so during a Presidential address. I would also like to believe that most thinking people recognize that boorish is not the same thing as racist.

Lest I get mail accusing me of believing that racism does not exist let me say in no uncertain terms that racism still exists in America. I have no doubt that there are people in this country that can little articulate their dislike for this president beyond the fact that he is black. Similarly, there are many that forgive his failings for the same reason. Yes, race in America is alive and well. (And based on the recent behavior of Kanye West and my sweet darling Serena Williams–so is boorishness. But I digress.)

To hold, as many on the new left do, that the “overwhelming portion of” opposition to this President is based on race is to engage in an egregious act of Venetian hearing; it is to turn ones back to the very legitimate concerns of voters and taxpayers. It is a contrivance that allows the current party in power to dismiss the honest and passionate voices of opposition.

Consider first that Wilson’s assertion was correct: the president was not being entirely truthful.

The administration points to section 246 of the current house bill, which excludes illegal immigrants from receiving “affordability credits” or vouchers with which to purchase health insurance. There is of course no enforcement mechanism in the bill to prevent those in this country illegally from receiving the credits. Democrats have voted down amendments adding such mechanisms.

There is also this quote from a recent report by the Associated Press on the current bill emerging from the Senate Finance committee: “The White House says that Obama does not want illegal immigrants to be able to buy insurance through the new purchasing exchange as they would be allowed to do under Democratic legislation in the House.” Word that illegal immigrants would not be covered under the House plan has apparently not trickled down to the senate finance committee, the Associated Press or Barack H. Obama.

Consider next that eight months into this administration President Obama has quadrupled the national debt, attempted to institute unprecedented control of banking institutions, taken over a major auto manufacturer and is now attempting to force on an unwilling populace a government run health care system. It is just possible that opposition to the President’s policies are based on principled political disagreements and not race.

I am only surprised that it took the left the better part of a year before they began to play the race game in earnest. The new left suffers from schizophrenia as it pertains to race. They claim to want to move past race in this country, but are reluctant to do so. Race provides them with a sense of security; they believe that through race they are able to keep their emotional and moral equilibrium. And because the left is emotionally tied to race it is a potent political weapon the use of which power seekers and power keepers will not soon relinquish.