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August 31, 2006

Notes from Ferdy - BBC Plans Virtual Assassination, Orson Welles Has No Comment

by Ferdinand T Cat

Bruce and I heard about this story on today's Tammy Bruce show. BBC4 is apparently planning to air a documentary-style simulation of the assassination of President Bush called Death of a President.

The bad news is that this new documentary is a "pointed political examination of what the war on terror is doing to the American body politic", so it's not going to be nearly as much fun to watch as Best in Show or This in Spinal Tap. Tammy suspects that the makers of the documentary would be quite happy to see Bush killed, an interpretation which is confirmed by the fact that the same company is also doing a hit piece on Tony Blair.

I have a different theory, which is that this is the next evolutionary step in the chronicle of the Orson Wells War of the Worlds broadcast. In October of 1994, CBS broadcast a fake documentary called Without Warning. Without Warning looked like a real news broadcast of an alien invasion. Despite frequent disclaimers, people were still fooled, giving the makers of the documentary the warm fuzzy feeling of being a part of something really special. In Britain, the bar for that kind of warm fuzzy feeling is set even higher: some people still believe that the April Fools conspiracy expose Alternative 3 is based on real events.

So, maybe the makers of Death of a President are hoping to to be remembered forever by starting an international panic. The problem is that Al-Jazeera might be one of the organizations fooled. Imagine, if you will, terrorists all over the world thinking that the President of the United States is dead.

Somehow, I think the consequences would be a lot more dire than anything in BBC4's fake documentary.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


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Tracked on August 31, 2006 5:20 PM

Comments

dire for who? ;D

cause my imagination pictures many dead terrorists who were silly enough to come out of hiding.


Posted by: maggie katzen at September 2, 2006 1:08 PM

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