A made-for-TV film is coming out that is a fictional future-set documentary about the assassination of President Bush at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago in October 2007. The film, written and directed by Gabriel Range, is 90 minutes long, and will be premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
Among other things, an “innocent” Middle Eastern Muslim will be “framed” for the crime, and it will critique the American War on Terror, but not critique radical Islamic terrorism. The article linked toward above also describes the film with glowing phrases like “gripping,” “thought-provoking,” “powerful,” “pointed,” and “sophisticated.”
Unless there’s something I am missing, the Secret Service has not yet opened an investigation of Mr. Range and his close associates.
You would think that the Secret Service would. After all, in 1996, St. Louisan John Ross, and investment banker (?) by trade, who was also the Democratic Nominee for U.S. House MO-2 in 1998, and who also holds conceal-carry classes for people to pass the Missouri CCW exams, wrote a book, entitled Unintended Consequences.
In it, Ross creates a fictional future-set documentary involving the uprising of various Second Amendment activists, whose ire about various Federal legislation involving Second Amendment issues provokes them to assault various Federal politicians, one of whom, at least in the fictional story, had a surname and political standing that suggests he was the fictional analogue to the real life Richard Gephardt.
Several years after Ross published the book, and during the process of the amicable separation between he and his wife of the time, the FBI actually approached the wife to try and get her to claim that Ross’s book wasn’t fiction but was instead a non-fictional methodological guidebook to “domestic terrorists” that might have had designs on really assassinating public figures.
Obviously, it wasn’t, and she wouldn’t lie and say that it was, but the fact that the FBI did this meant two things: (1) They had these thoughts about Unintended Consequences all along, and (2) They assumed that a divorce would necessarily mean hostile feelings, and they thought that by swooping down and grabbing the wife on the way out of the marriage, she would be so mad at him that she would either “truthfully” rat out his “real” motives for the book, or lie to the FBI and claim that there were pernicious motives for the book, either way it would justify the FBI’s paranoia and create a legal tar baby for John Ross.
With all this having been said, I’m waiting for the U.S. Secret Service to try and play these kind of tricks on Gabriel Range. If they don’t, that’ll communicate a lot to me about the political bent of Federal law enforcement.
[...] A few months ago, I cited local author John Ross his controversial fictional literature. The trouble there is that real men and women of public authority have taken it way too seriously; in fact, they’re the only people who have taken it seriously. Their doing so did put Ross’s character and reputation at risk, needlessly so. [...]