TMG Scale 6.0
Starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn
If you are looking for gross exaggeration and fantasy, you might like this film. If you like whining and sniveling liberals like Sean Penn who still want to blame President Bush for everything from war to the price of going to the movie theatre, by all means, enjoy! While TMG enjoys any good fiction thriller, we cannot enjoy or endorse the total distortion of history. This film should have been entitled, Everything but the Truth, in contrast to the much better Valerie Plame style film from 2008 entitled Nothing but the Truth with Matt Dillon and Alan Alda. TMG says to definitely rent the latter rather than waste your time on Fair Game.
This film is supposedly the “true story ” of Valerie Plame. Plame (played well by Naomi Watts) was supposedly a high level covert CIA agent. The facts are still in dispute over her real status. This film makes a joke of her. By all credible accounts, Plame was indeed outed by Vice Presidential counsel, Scooter Libby to columnist Robert Novak. The reported motive was revenge for her husband Joe Wilson (played by Penn) writing a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
First, the United States did not invade Iraq in 2003–-it already occupied over half the country since the 1991 treaty ending the Gulf War. For those too young or with bad memory, there were hundreds of valid reasons for the United States to invade Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein in 2003. The claimed sale of yellow cake uranium and aluminum centrifuge tubes, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were a nit issue and barely relevant to the bigger picture. This movie would make you think they were the all important center of the issue. They were not. Besides, the hypothetical questions raised between national security and the first amendment in Nothing but the Truth were much more interesting and provocative.
The outing of a CIA agent, whether they are significant or not, is wrong and illegal. If history judges this is what Scooter Libby actually did, he should have been shot for treason. But rewriting history to suggest that Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson were at the center of the debate or even significant issues for or against removing Saddam Hussein from power, is just nonsense. If you feel President Bush, The British and the overwhelming support of the moral world community needed more justification to remove Saddam Hussein, consider the rape and torture of women in his own country as some cause. Or do you support that sort of thing?