Obama, Clinton Reprise Role as Movie Reviewers in Pakistan Ads Meant to Calm Protests

Even as the president acknowledges the movie was just an excuse for an attack

At this point, maybe Rotten Tomatoes should add Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to their list of top critics. As protestors continue to make noise outside the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, the embassy has purchased advertisements on Pakistani television stations to publicize our leaders' condemnations of Innocence of Muslims. Via the Associated Press:

The television ads in Pakistan feature clips of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during press appearances in Washington in which they condemned the video. Their words were subtitled in Urdu.

"We absolutely reject its content and message," said Clinton in the advertisement.

The advertisements end with the seal of the American Embassy in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

So are any of the Jewish faith out there repulsed by The Possession? Now's your chance to demand the government weigh in on any act of filmmaking that offends you. Just go throw a rock at your local AMC theater and demand Kyra Sedgwick be punished for blasphemy.

This is fertile ground for parody – you listening out there, Saturday Night Live?

My search to find the commercial on YouTube was unsuccessful, but the description makes it sound like a clip show of all the speeches we've already seen and already been a bit horrified by. I did, however, track down some other videos mentioned in the story. The State Department managed to bother some bystanders somewhere (I'm assuming this is in D.C.) to give their "average American" opinions of the movie. Some of them, at least, made a stand for free speech, like this guy who says of the movie, "I don't think they cause real harm. They should be ignored."

But why ignore things when you can raise a huge stink in order to demand world leaders validate your faith?

And as I was writing this, President Obama has finally publicly agreed that Muslim extremists used the video as an excuse for an attack on U.S. interests. So we're diplomatically compromising our nation's promotion of free speech as a core value to what end, then? What does the State Department think the outcome of this commercial is going to be?

UPDATE: Here's the commercial. It's literally just parts of Obama's and Clinton's speeches following the Benghazi attack.