Saturday, September 02, 2006



Killing the President

A British TV channel has made a drama exploring the effects of the war on terror on US society, which depicts President Bush being assassinated. Americans are of course outraged; here's what a spokesperson for the Texas Republicans had to say:

"I find this shocking, I find it disturbing. I don't know if there are many people in America who would want to watch something like that."

That's fine - there's plenty of people outside America who will.

9 comments:

Yes, but they'd all be fuckwits, wouldn't they? Seriously, what sort of cretin would want to watch a fictional assasination to derive some form of real satisfaction from it?

Posted by Anonymous : 9/02/2006 10:22:00 AM

Its only drama...surely people are entitled to make and watch a movie about Bush, or any other president get assassinated.

I mean, if everyone felt that way, "The Day of The Jackal" would not be made because it would have angered the French...

The yanks need to get a life, Im sick of their bullshit..

Posted by Anonymous : 9/02/2006 11:36:00 AM

Anon: that would depend on whether it made for good fiction or not, wouldn't it?

They're adopting the form of a mock documentary, but they're still doing fiction, and trying to tell a story. And I don't really have a problem with that.

And as Millsy has pointed out, its not as if this hasn't been done before. But I guess the rules are different for the hegemon, right?

Posted by Idiot/Savant : 9/02/2006 11:59:00 AM

Millsy:

Well, I guess my pitch for a 'mockumentary' depicting the assassination of Helen Clark will receive oodles of NZ On Air funding, a prime time slot on TVNZ and the full cooperation of the subject? Yeah right...

And I find it rather ironic that distributor Film Four reportedly was one of the many companies that passed on Stephen Frears' The Queen - which premieres at the Venice Film Festival tonight - because it's fictionalised depiction of the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana was "too controversial". But I guess the rules are different in Cool Britannia.

Posted by Anonymous : 9/02/2006 06:20:00 PM

Personally I think we'd be better off if Cheney was assasinated, and for real.

Posted by Anonymous : 9/03/2006 02:24:00 AM

I'd rather see a documentary that dramatises the trial of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et el.

Plebian

Posted by Anonymous : 9/03/2006 12:18:00 PM

This thing's the height of rudeness. The man is still acting president.

Wonderfl how rude people get to be in a free society. Shame is the US corporate media system will ban it all on their own.

Posted by tussock : 9/03/2006 03:26:00 PM

Surprisingly I can understand the US sensitivity on this issue. Spencer Perceval, in 1812, is the only British prime minister to be assassinated so far. Given that Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy were all assassinated and Reagan narrowly survived an attempt, not to mention the "what could have been" killing of Bobby Kennedy, combined with the high number of heavily armed lunatics running around the USA, and the general tradition of using firearms to resolve municple issues I can sympathise with the Americans disquiet.

Posted by Sanctuary : 9/04/2006 10:58:00 AM

"Narrowly preventing the assassination of a US President through the dramatic last-minute actions of our hero" is a stock-n-trade plotline for plenty of US dramas. So what if, for once, the hero fails? Yawn.

Posted by dc_red : 9/04/2006 12:09:00 PM