Frank Rich: Top Gun vs. Total Recall

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In Monday's The New York Times

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... since 9/11, too many journalists have been all too willing to look the other way when the Bush administration engages in Hollywood showmanship to cover up its failings. Some have gone so far as to help foment the fictions. Showtime, the cable network, boasts that no fewer than three journalists, including the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, were involved in assuring the accuracy and balance of the docudrama "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," first shown last Sunday while the actual George W. Bush was addressing the nation. But this film, made with full Bush administration cooperation (including that of the president himself), is propaganda so untroubled by reality that it's best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl. The script vouched for by Mr. Krauthammer and a couple of other Beltway boys presents Dick Cheney as a mere supplicant to the all-knowing Mr. Bush and somehow lets the administration (though not its predecessor) off the hook for letting Osama bin Laden and his Saudi enablers slip away.

New polls reveal that Americans increasingly realize that they have been had. Reruns are not kind to this White House's scripted costume drama of May 1; the seams show. More and more viewers recognize that the banner reading "Mission Accomplished" in the "Top Gun" spectacle was idle set decoration, especially given that the number of American casualties in that mission has more than doubled since then. They know, too, that the president's uniform was from stock, and perhaps by now have heard how his speech was deliberately delayed almost three hours after his tailhook landing so that it would fall into that magical twilight hour that cinematographers find most romantic. Some may even realize that the president's breezy dialogue upon deplaning — "I miss flying, I can tell you that" — was too ironic by half, given that he had actually missed some of his required flights during his stay-at-home stint for the Texas Air National Guard while others fought the Vietnam War.

There was only one bit of unadorned realism in the White House's slick "Top Gun." The servicemen and women on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln were not dress extras; they were actual troops whose deployment at sea had been extended from 6 months to nearly 10, the longest by a carrier in 30 years, to help fill the maw of an understaffed war. According to the Navy's press office, members of the Lincoln's crew photographed with the president on that day may have already been redeployed on another carrier. It is the real-life terminators on the prowl in Iraq, not the sentimental White House screenwriters responsible for "Mission Accomplished," who are poised to write the ending for that crew and all their fellow troops now.