Sunday, December 5, 2010

Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson get Another 15 Minutes of Fame

Valerie Plame at an event at Moravian College ...Image via Wikipedia
Apparently Hollywood has made a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. The innaccuracies prompted the Washigton Post to take exception to Hollywood's myth-making on the yellow cake uranium from Niger controversy:
WE'RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film "Fair Game" - which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq - deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame's exposure as a CIA agent. "It's accurate," Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: "For people who have short memories or don't read, this is the only way they will remember that period."
People who have short memories or don't read!?! How big are the amnesia and preschooler demographics and what makes Joe Wilson think they would have similar taste in movies? The Post points out numerous factual errors with the film and concludes:
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. We'll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.
One wonders if the WikiLeaks document dump will shed any light on the credibility of Plame and Wilson.

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