I'm pretty impressed PBS named their program on the NeoCons "The Case for War." That's truth in advertising. Meanwhile, "America at a Crossroads," the series it comes from, looks like a genuinely impressive piece of work. The sort of intellectually serious, elegantly produced, timely explorations of major issues that folks always lamenting never appear on television, but then don't actually watch when it does. You should watch the teaser (at the bottom right), however, which'll get your blood going.
Update: Over at Salon, there's a fairly comprehensive takedown of the series. Although in the requisite paragraph explaining why a PBS series merits a feature-length takedown, I was amused to see this particular justification: "Crossroads comes anointed as a kind of quasi-official statement about how Americans should think about 9/11, Islamist terrorism, and America's relations with the Arab/Muslim world. As a result, it has the potential to pass its intellectual blind spots on to the American people."
Folks, nobody watches PBS. This documentary series will not be an epochal event. I'm a political professional with a very large television, and I didn't even know it was happening till Matt snarked at a Washington Post online chat with Richard Perle. But that aside, this seems like a fair point:
Why did this embarrassing film -about Perle and the NeoCons] make the cut? In the eyes of our media gatekeepers, taking their cue from Congress and their equally cowed or ignorant media brethren, even a discredited right-wing thinker like Perle is ready for prime time, while a left-wing thinker like Robert Fisk is not. After all, Perle's ideas are enshrined in the White House, while Fisk is a dangerous bomb-thrower whose opinions about the Middle East are too uncomfortable to be given wide circulation. Forget the fact that Perle and Bush's lovely little war has turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, or that Fisk, who actually knows something about the Middle East, has been proven right time and again. The media bureaucracy plods dutifully on, playing by the same old rules...After all, we've had no opportunity to hear neocon ideas except on every network, every cable channel, the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, Fox News, all the major newsweeklies, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, Slate and just about every other media outlet. This intolerable censorship of failed right-wing ideas must cease!
Why we didn't follow Juan Cole, or David Rieff, or some other progressive around is actually a fair question. After all: The last few years have been an experiment into what happens when we buy into the neocon "case for war." There's much more ground to be broken theorizing what would happen if we went in the opposite direction for awhile.
