It’s silver, it’s gone.
I see from the Liberty Film Festival (Sundance for Bedwetters!) that Ron Silver is continuing his descent into lunacy with an affiliation that makes Tom Cruise’s attachment to Scientology seem quaint.
Silver has always been an articulate spokeman for his beliefs but somewhere down the line he got a double dose of the post-9/11 dementia of the type that afflicted Dennis Miller and Roger Simon. From the Liberty lineup:
8:30PM “Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60” – LA Premiere! (65 mins., 2005)
Actor Ron Silver narrates this explosive documentary about the UN. “Broken Promises” identifies the enormous promise of the U.N. at its founding – and its failure to live up to that promise in humanitarian disasters in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Middle-East. Featuring interviews with Natan Sharansky, Donald Trump, Congressman Dan Burton, General Romeo Dallaire, Ambassador Dore Gold, Senator George Mitchell, Claudia Rosett, and UN aid workers, peacekeepers, and officials, “Broken Promises” makes a powerful case for UN reform. Directed by Kevin Knoblock, produced by David N. Bossie and Ron Silver. Ron Silver and the filmmakers are planning to attend in person, so be sure to buy tickets to this exciting event early!
The program will feature a Q&A with the filmmakers. (my emphasis)
That would be this David N. Bossie:
David N. Bossie serves as President of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation, conservative grassroots organizations located in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Bossie is the former Chief Investigator for the United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. During Bill Clinton’s two terms as president, Bossie led investigations ranging from the Whitewater land deal to the illegal foreign money schemes in the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign and the illegal transfer of dual-use technology to China.
Bossie is the Executive Producer of the documentary Celsius 41.11 and author of two books, Intelligence Failure, How Bill Clinton’s Natonal Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11 and The Many Faces of John Kerry, Why This Massachusettes Liberal is Wrong For America. Bossie co-wrote “Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore” in 2000.
Of course that doesn’t tell the half of it…
Try this:
As Media Matters for America has previously noted, Bossie was fired in 1998 from his job as chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight — which was investigating alleged Clinton White House campaign finance abuses — for his role in releasing selectively edited transcripts of former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell’s prison conversations. (Hubbell went to prison for defrauding his Little Rock, AR, law firm.) According to a May 7, 1998, article in The Washington Times, “Mr. Burton said David Bossie had ‘chosen to resign,’ although House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Mr. Burton ‘fired the one person he should have fired.'” The Washington Times quoted Burton conceding: “A mistake was made in not including in the 30 pages of transcripts a couple of comments made by Mr. Hubbell about himself and the first lady. They were relevant, and they should not have been left out.” The Washington Times concluded its piece by noting, “Mr. Bossie is no stranger to controversy. … Republicans said yesterday that they also blamed Mr. Bossie for the notorious melon-shooting, staged re-enactment of the death of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster Jr.”
Or maybe this:
Bossie joined Citizens United in 1992 as its director of political affairs, which he quickly transformed into a full-time job of hounding the Clintons. The group was essentially a two-man operation. Four years earlier Citizens United had produced the infamous race-baiting Willie Horton ad. “That spot was, is, will ever after be a nightmare,” GOP strategist Mary Matalin once told the Chicago Tribune.
In fact, in 1992, Bush’s father condemned Bossie and Brown’s gutter practices, telling reporters: “We will do whatever we can to stop any filthy campaign tactics.” During that same campaign, George W. Bush, on his father’s behalf, even sent out a letter to 85,000 Republican contributors encouraging them not to contribute to Brown and Bossie’s effort.
[…]
Bossie has engaged in such questionable or downright slimy tactics on many occasions. Here are some of his more famous misses:
# During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bossie got into a fistfight with a Little Rock, Ark., private investigator, Larry Case, who said he had damaging information on Clinton. Bossie told police that Case had punched him after Bossie refused to pay Case a $10,000 advance as they were preparing to board a flight at Little Rock National Airport.
# That same year, Bossie set out to prove that a young pregnant woman named Susan Coleman had committed suicide in 1977 after having an affair with Clinton. Coleman’s mother told CBS that Bossie hounded her relentlessly with his false story, even following her to an Army hospital in Georgia, where she was visiting her husband, in recovery from a stroke. Bossie and another man “burst into the sick man’s room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter’s suicide,” CBS reported.
# Also in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, repudiating Bossie’s tactics, filed an FEC complaint against Bossie’s group after it produced a TV ad inviting voters to call a hot line to hear (almost certainly doctored) tape-recorded conversations between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.
# In 1994, Bossie traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., with an NBC producer, where the two allegedly “stalked” and “ambushed” Beverly Bassett Schaffer, a former state regulatory officer and a lawyer who had played a small role in the so-called Whitewater conspiracy. The two confronted Schaffer outside her office and, after she refused an on-camera interview, reportedly chased her across town, until she found refuge in the lobby of an office building.
# In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had “dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater.” Another mailing reported that Bossie was “on the inside directing the probe.” Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D’Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.
# In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie’s deceptive presence to “Ollie North running around the House.”
# In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of “unrelenting” self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible “to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney’s Office.” (Bossie’s habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)
Lie down with dogs…
****
Liberty Film Festival bonus:
SCREENWRITER’S PANEL DISCUSSION “What Stories is Hollywood Not Telling?”
This exciting panel will feature screenwriters Andrew Klavan (Clint Eastwood’s True Crime), screenwriter and blogger Roger L. Simon (Woody Allen’s Scenes From a Mall), Craig Titley (Scooby-Doo, Steve Martin’s Cheaper By The Dozen), Paul Guay (Jim Carrey’s Liar, Liar), Burt Prelutsky (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, MASH), and Charlie Carner (Vanishing Point).
The program will feature a Q&A with the panelists.
“Yes. I’d like to ask Craig Titley if he received any pressure from Hollywood’s liberal establishment when writing dialogue for a cartoon Great Dane.”
Ruh-roh…
