Asawin Suebsaeng

In late August, action-film maestro Tony Scott took his own life, jumping from the Vincent Thomas Bridge into the Los Angeles Harbor. One of the director's final projects was a made-for-TV movie that he co-executive produced with his brother Ridley: An adaptation of the nonfiction thriller Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever, a best-selling book written by writer Martin Dugard and TV host Bill O'Reilly. The film (premiering  on National Geographic Channel on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 8 p.m. ET/PT) stars Billy Campbell as President Abraham Lincoln and son of Don Johnson Jesse Johnson as stage-actor/assassin John Wilkes Booth. The movie is narrated by Tom Hanks' soothing timbre.

The made-for-cable Killing Lincoln continues Nat Geo's recent habit of debuting an original film right around the time a more high-profile movie with similar content is making the rounds in movie theaters and the awards circuit. (In November, the channel released its Bin Laden assassination movie starring William Fichtner—a project that might have reminded some viewers of this.)

Killing Lincoln never rises above marginally passable entertainment. It is a generally clunky and flavorless exercise weakly mimicking prestige filmmaking. It is also the latest in a months-long deluge of Lincoln movies that includes Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Steven Spielberg's massive Oscar-bait Lincoln, Saving Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, and Army of Frankensteins. Yet Killing Lincoln has one distinction among this bunch: It just might be the most historically accurate.

This may seem odd, given that the movie is based on a mediocre book that Bill O'Reilly wrote in his spare time in between creatively reinterpreting reality at Fox News. Furthermore, it's a book that history buffs have flagged for being pocked with factual errors.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

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Paul Fleet/Shutterstock

Last week, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) gave a sort of backhanded defense of the Obama administration's controversial targeted killing program.

"To be honest, I believe that drones are a lot more civilized than what we used to do, you know, when Sherman shelled Atlanta or when the Allies firebombed Dresden in World War II, it was all collateral damage. It was virtually all civilians. And that was the way of war until very recently," King said on Friday's episode of MSNBC's Morning Joe. "The drones, although there is some collateral damage, basically is a very smart artillery shell...[I]f you put it in a context of 1,000 years of war, I think it's actually a more humane weapon because it can be targeted to specific enemies and specific people."

Of course, that doesn't have much to do with drone critics' actual arguments, and Sen. King was wise enough to point that out during his interview: "Now, I do think there’s a problem...about targeting Americans. There is this little item of the Fifth Amendment that says no person shall be denied life, liberty or property without due process of law."

But King's initial point is unimpeachably true: When you look at the history of warfare between 1013 A.D. and now, it's hard to come to the conclusion that drone warfare is any more barbaric or indiscriminate than what humanity has become used to over the past ten centuries. For instance:

when the normans invaded ireland in 1169

Land was taken, the regime was changed, and much brutality was exacted with swords. Via the University of Alabama at Birmingham

 When Pope Innocent III launched the tw0-decade Albigensian Crusade

It's this particularly horrific crusade that gave birth to the phrase, "Kill them all; let God sort them out." Via Wikimedia Commons

that time the Qing Dynasty put down the Taiping Rebellion between 1850 and 1864

20 million killed, mostly civilians. Via Wikimedia Commons

when america went to the philippines...

Click here for a rundown of American atrocities during the war. Via New York Journal

napalm

Napalm during the Vietnam War has a remarkably ugly legacy.

US Naval War College Museum

US-backED death squads

Memorial of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. Efrojas/Wikimedia Commons

IRAQ

Staff Sgt. Sean A. Foley/US Army

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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