Thursday, March 08, 2007
The Softer Side of Richard Perle
Many many moons ago I wrote about a rumor that PBS was supposedly going to air a hagiographical documentary on Richard Perle. This tidbit was mentioned offhandedly in a piece about rightwingers taking over PBS. Well, it may have taken a while, but Richard Perle: The Movie is going to air in April as part of a series called America at the Crossroads.
The deal is that the producer of the show, Brian Lapping, is a personal friend of Perle's, the next door neighbor of Perle's villa in France, so one can imagine how fair and balanced this thing is going to be. According to David Corn the film will show "the softer side of Perle and argue that all those people out there who regard Perle as the Price of Darkness are simply misguided.":
Actually I'm kind of looking forward to it in a sort of masochistic way. I have a feeling it's going to be strange to watch. The thing was so long in production that it's going to be like a time capsule from a bygone era -- sort of like watching a WWII propaganda film or something.
Anyway, it's nice to know they're putting our tax dollars to good use...
The deal is that the producer of the show, Brian Lapping, is a personal friend of Perle's, the next door neighbor of Perle's villa in France, so one can imagine how fair and balanced this thing is going to be. According to David Corn the film will show "the softer side of Perle and argue that all those people out there who regard Perle as the Price of Darkness are simply misguided.":
It gets worse. The GOP hacks now in charge at CPB did realize they needed some balance. So they also commissioned a film that would be critical of Bush's foreign policy. Note that the CPB did not take steps to insure that the film on Perle would be balanced. No, it greenlighted a project designed as a puff piece about a man who was utterly wrong about Iraq. Recently on this site I chronicled but a few of Perle's whoppers. Before the war, he said there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein had revved up a nuclear weapons program. He also claimed that Iraq could be easily taken with a military force of 40,000 or less. In other words, he knew nothing, but, not letting ignorance stand in the way, he urged America on to war. You think any of this is going to end up as a significant piece of Lapping's wetkiss?
Actually I'm kind of looking forward to it in a sort of masochistic way. I have a feeling it's going to be strange to watch. The thing was so long in production that it's going to be like a time capsule from a bygone era -- sort of like watching a WWII propaganda film or something.
Anyway, it's nice to know they're putting our tax dollars to good use...
Labels: PBS, propaganda, Richard Perle
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Richard Perle comes out against the invasion of Iraq:
(from Vanity Fair)
Also Tom Tomorrow mentions in his post about the above that there's a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine in which Chalabi tries to blame everything on Wolfowitz -- has anyone seen this?
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
(from Vanity Fair)
Also Tom Tomorrow mentions in his post about the above that there's a piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine in which Chalabi tries to blame everything on Wolfowitz -- has anyone seen this?
Labels: Neoconservatives, Richard Perle, Tom Tomorrow, Vanity Fair
