Same event, two movies.

Scott Adams speaks of people watching two movies - the same flow of facts and dialog but with two different interpretations of what is happening in the movie.

A couple of minor examples of that which come together this morning.

Sometime in the past 2-3 days I picked up commentary from NPR related to when President Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about his workplace dalliance with a subordinate. The claim made was that he turned over 90,000 pages of documents to the House during its investigation.

Something did not sit quite right with the claim. While 90,000 pages sounds like a lot, is it really? My email account over the past decade would printout as more than 90,000 pages. I am not sure that 90,000 pages is as impressive a metric as is implied. Second, I remember those proceedings reasonably well. Clinton was under continuous investigation from soon after his election - Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate are the things that spring to mind. Sex in the Oval office was an incidental discovery to the financial and operational crimes alleged.

The House impeachment investigation was just another investigation. Clinton fought all of those investigations, refusing to the last minute and under judicial duress, to turn over documents. Did he really cooperate with the House investigation.

Listening to the claim on the radio, a claim repeated by multiple interviewees and pundits, that didn't sound quite right. That's only twenty years ago. Why are the media accepting the claim so glibly? It should be easy to question.

As Byron York does in Impeachment, Democrats, and those 90,000 documents. So am I misremembering or are the media pundits misrepresenting? B.

So a question: Where did the figure of 90,000 pages, or documents, come from? Did Clinton helpfully cooperate with the House Republicans who were trying to remove him from office 20 years ago?

It turns out Schiff, Pelosi, and their colleagues were not telling the whole story. They got the 90,000 figure, apparently, from Clinton's rebuttal to the Starr report — the report independent counsel Kenneth Starr turned over to Congress on Sept. 9, 1998, after seven months of investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair. In that rebuttal, given to Congress on Sept. 11, Clinton's lawyers wrote: "During the past four and a half years, the President has ... produced more than 90,000 pages of documents and other items" to investigators.

But not to Congress. The Clinton situation was entirely different from the one Schiff and his fellow Democrats face today. Starr was an independent counsel with full law enforcement powers, and his office issued many grand jury subpoenas pushing Clinton, who often resisted fiercely, to turn over the 90,000 documents over the course of four and a half years, covering the Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and Lewinsky investigations.

"If memory serves me correctly, I don't think he voluntarily gave us anything," said Sol Weisenberg, a former Starr prosecutor, in a conversation Tuesday.

York is a partisan commentator so his position needs to be taken with a grain of salt as well but it matches much more closely with my own recollection.

So back to the movie. We hear the same dialog - 90,000 pages. One person, by youth or poor memory or partisan commitment or faith in the media or lack of reading, hears 90,000 and imputes significance. I hear the same claim and because I read excessively and remember much and lived through that period and recall the events, I impute bad faith argument. One dialog, two movies.

Then there was this flap from a couple of days ago reported by Ed Driscoll in Nazis, Nazis, Everywhere! Talia Lavin was the New Yorker magazine fact-checker who had to resign a couple of years ago after claiming an ICE agent had a Nazi tattoo. He was a badly injured veteran who had a military tattoo which she simply failed to recognize. Nothing to do with Nazi's. She apologized and resigned. Bad incident but a reasonable outcome in that media people have the capacity to destroy ordinary people's lives and careers through simple malicious carelessness.

Well, she's back. And still watching the other movie. There was the demonstration in Virginia this week in support of second amendment rights. Despite all the preparatory scare stories heralding riots and massacres, it went off without a hiccough. Some 20,000 people, many heavily armed, strolled around Richmond. There were amusing placards galore. I especially liked

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And harsh but humorous partisan memes of course.

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And then there was Talia Lavin's take:

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To which Driscoll responds.

Julio Rosas of Townhall tweets, “Oh look, another person who was *not* at the rally trying to tell everyone else that it wasn’t *really* peaceful. The article also does not mention or acknowledge the hundreds of minorities, who were armed as well, that were there in support of the rally.”

Its all a bunch of partisan sniping at one another.

One of the inadvertent points is that of course you have to read the media skeptically.

The other is that there are always two movies playing. Peaceful, diverse, good-natured, amusing American demonstration for civil rights or yet another nazi related disturbance? Same event, two movies.