This flap over the 9/11 movie on ABC strikes me as one of the grandest examples yet of the neocon tendency towards psychological projection -- i.e., where you take your own flaws and assign them to people around you. A pretty common habit of neocons, from what I can tell, but this time they've pulled a whopper.

I mean, one of the more egregious lies in the movie -- as reported by those who had advance copies -- shows Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger hanging up the phone on military officers in the field who have Osama bin Laden in their sights and are waiting for approval to capture him.

Now, maybe there are some Bush voters who remain stupid or stubborn enough to believe that this could actually have happened. It's not intuitive at all. But here's what we do know:

It's the Bushes, not the Clintons, who had financial relations with the bin Laden family. It's Bush who ordered that bin Laden's family be put on planes after 9/11 and spirited out of the country, even when all commercial aviation was still grounded.

So for rightwingers to point at Clinton and imply that for some oddball reason he did NOT want to capture or kill Osama makes absolutely no sense at all. Unless they're projecting!

Because, remember: Osama is still out there. Why is that, exactly? Is it because Bush and his administration are incompetent, as the evidence from the failed mission at Tora Bora suggest, or is it because he really doesn't WANT to capture Osama. I think both. But if you buy into the latter notion -- that Bush and Osama more or less need each other -- then ABC's neocon-minded 9/11 movie is a special travesty.

The one edit they could make to improve its accuracy on short notice? Change the actor credits:

"And Bill Clinton, as President George W. Bush."