The Balls on Some People

I've been trying to quantify my unhappiness about Bill Clinton and friends trying to get ABC to pull "The Path to 9/11" off the air because of a small amount of unflattering portrayal therein, but Dean Esmay has done it so well I'll just quote him:

The 9/11 "docudrama" (i.e. fictionalized version of historical events) ABC is
planning to air tonight generated a letter from Democratic senators, which John
Aravosis says is a threat to yank their license, and Kos links that interpretation approvingly.

Pull a network off the air. Over an explicitly fictional show that isn't even all that inaccurate, just because it criticizes Democrats. Even the threat of such an action is absolutely appalling in its audacious disregard for the Constitution and free speech. Think about that: not because it incites violence, or discloses national security secrets, or encourages terrorists, but because it has a viewpoint critical of a former administration. This is not a dispute over whether the President's wiretapping of terrorists might make people less free to talk on the phone, or whether calling someone unpatriotic "crushes their dissent," this is directly wielding the power of the government to punish opposing views: these are police state tactics. This is the kind of thing people like Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, and Saddam Hussein do -- and the nutroots couldn't be happier about it, because it serves their ends.

This seems to be a concrete example of what Kos and Co. mean when they talk about being tactical, not ideological: it's a nice way of saying they have no principles whatsoever beneath their partisan lust for power. This is deeply disturbing, much more so than Kos' "screw them" comments, because now they're talking about exercising power, in a way they would be screaming bloody murder over were the situation reversed.

This is exactly the sort of behavior that forces me to vote Republican even when I disagree with half their platform.

Nothing short of criminal. Boycotting ABC, should they go through with such a cowardly move, is one way to start, and since they don't have Monday Night Football any more I'm pretty sure I've been boycotting them since the end of the last NFL season anyway. But what to do about the kind of people who think this is a viable method to get what they want, and think sterilizing the historical record to protect a past and potentially future president is no big deal as long as those evil republicans don't try it?