The European trailer for "The Path to 9/11."

Over on Kos, where they keep calling the show "Disney/ABC conservative fan fiction," they're saying:

[T]he advertisement makes it very clear just what sort of Limbaugh-style political porn this thing was intended to be.

The trailer certainly makes the movie look exciting. It made me go back to the NYT review by TV critic Alessandra Stanley. ("'The Path to 9/11' is an unsparing, and at times hyperbolic, portrait of bureaucratic turf wars, buck passing and complacency.") A lot of the bloggers who have been railing about "The Path" are laying into her. I see that there's a correction there now:

The TV Watch column in Weekend yesterday, about the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11,” referred incorrectly to a conclusion of the commission that investigated the terror attacks. The commission said the accusation that President Clinton had ordered air strikes against Osama bin Laden in August 1998 to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal was one of several factors that “likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force” against Mr. bin Laden. It did not conclude that the scandal distracted the Clinton administration from the terrorist threat.

There. Happy now?

Anyway, this is Stanley's key point that's relevant to the demands to yank the film:

All mini-series Photoshop the facts. “The Path to 9/11” is not a documentary, or even a docu-drama; it is a fictionalized account of what took place. It relies on the report of the Sept. 11 commission, the King James version of all Sept. 11 accounts, as well as other material and memoirs. Some scenes come straight from the writers’ imaginations. Yet any depiction of those times would have to focus on those who were in charge, and by their own accounts mistakes were made.

Various bloggers (and commenters in the preceding post) are crying slander and saying that the public figures who are seeing themselves portrayed here ought to sue. I'm not going to belabor the point I've already made in comments, but it seems very clear to me that the legal standard they are talking about would be outrageously repressive. Why is it so hard to step back for a minute and see how the ideas you're expressing would apply in other situations?