Bush, The Movie!

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It looks like the Oliver Stone movie biography of George W. Bush, "W" is progressing along the lines one might expect. According to ABC News which got a copy of an early version of the script the movie presents a "humanistic portrait of the president". No, really. They actually said that.

The film seems to bear a number of similarities to another film based on another Republican President, CBS' The Reagan's which documented such well known episodes in President Ronald Reagan's life as his conversation with wife Nancy in which he said, referring to homosexuals suffering from AIDS, "They that live in sin shall die in sin." (Well, actually he never said that but CBS apparently thought he would have if only...if...he...had(?) Well, you know what they meant.) That film, by the way proved so controversial due to a host of falsified scenes like that one that CBS wound up airing it on their pay cable channel, Showtime.

"W" stars Josh Brolin, the son actor James Brolin who played Reagan in The Reagan's. Brolin, by the way is married to Democratic activist/actress, the legendary Barbra Streisand, who in 2006 included as part of her concert performances, a skit using a Bush impersonator making the President look foolish. As another aside Brolin, pere gained some recent notoriety by saying on a local New Haven, CT radio show, "Happy 9/11" and "Celebrate the day, right?"

This films seems to have the same sort of interest in historical accuracy as the Reagan film as it contains scenes such as the following:

One explosive scene in the movie features press secretary Ari
Fleischer complaining to Bush about longtime reporter Helen Thomas who questioned the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Bush explodes in a
profanity-laced outburst , "Did you tell her I don't like motherf-who gas their own people! Did you tell her I don't like a-- holes who try to kill my father! Did you tell her I'm going to kick his & a-- all over the Middle East?"

Fleischer says it never happened.


Stone's interest in accuracy can perhaps best be seen in his other biopic of a Republican president, the 1996 "Nixon" which Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle said,

The real Nixon looks and sounds like another Jack Kennedy next to
the version presented in ``Nixon,'' Oliver Stone's overblown biographical epic on the life and career of our 37th president. In the title role, Hopkins sweats and twitches, walks like an ape, hunches his shoulders and looks like a man on the edge of a breakdown.

The ridiculous thing is that this is Stone's image not just of the private Nixon but of the public Nixon, too. The Nixon who could
be a cool customer, who could slam home a stump speech, who could deal as an equal with guys like Brezhnev, is nowhere to be found.

Instead you get the pathetic Nixon as described by Woodward and Bernstein in ``The Final Days.'' So we see him looking paranoid and speaking haltingly, for example, as he delivers
his acceptance speech at the 1968 Republican convention -- a speech that the real Nixon thundered out forcefully.

"W" is expected to be released sometime in 2009. Get your tickets early.

Couldn't They Tell?

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After hearing about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's admission yesterday of his involvement with a prostitution ring my first reaction was: Oh, so that's what its going to be. By that I mean I was somewhat surprised about the particulars of the revelation but I can't say that I was surprised that Spitzer, well known as arrogant, heavy-handed, mean, vindictive, egotistical and just plain unpleasant, had managed to shoot himself in the foot.

When I heard that he'd been elected, and in a landslide yet, I thought that it was just a matter of time before he would do something stupid, really stupid. Not that Spitzer himself is stupid. Far from it. Scoring a very impressive 1590 on his SATs Spitzer went on to Princeton U. undergrad before going to Harvard Law where he edited the Harvard Law Review. And his ambition has been the equal of his brains. Eliot Spitzer has never missed an opportunity to make an impression, always going after the high profile, big pr cases; going after pregnancy crisis centers to please New York's pro-abortion Left, payola in the music industry, big shot businessmen. He was a legal Master of the Universe. So taken with his own gifts and position was he that he thought anything he did was acceptable merely by virtue of the fact that he did it. He'd make calls threatening people, inappropriately used the State Police to investigate his chief nemesis, Republican State Minority Leader, Joseph L. Bruno, arrogantly issued an unpopular executive order allowing driver's licenses to be issued to illegal aliens.

He was also widely despised by almost everybody who ever had the bad fortune to have dealt with him, which explains why so few people are willing to come to his defense now. So when news came yesterday that he had finally imploded, it was not exactly the year's biggest shock.

What does surprise me however is the way the American people continue to elect catastrophes waiting to happen like Spitzer. Here's a confession: I'm not a genius; just a fairly regular guy (despite being "Right" so dang often) but I knew this guy was, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, yeah...a freak. Couldn't the 69% of voters who put Spitzer in office see this, too? Apparently not.

But Americans have a long and impressive history of voting for dysfunctional politicians. The last fifty years alone have produced such giants of history as Louisiana Governor Earl Long, who was committed to a mental hospital while in office; Cincinnati city council member and then Mayor Jerry Springer (yes, that Jerry Springer) who resigned after a revelation of his patronizing (surprise!) a prostitute; Washington DC Mayor and crack addict Marion Barry; President Richard Nixon, whose paranoia and generally warped psyche have been fodder for books for decades and Bill Clinton, a self involved narcissist whose entire Presidency was about one thing and one thing only: him. All that is missing from each of these distinguished gents is a day glow etching of the words HELP ME on their foreheads.

Now it is a truism that bright, talented people who seek office often have gargantuan egos. Ronald Reagan was that rarity among rarities who was both an actor and a politician, both lines of work which attract egomaniacs, who was actually well adjusted.

The public can be forgiven for not spotting some political rotten apples. In the ordinary course of life everybody gets surprised by the behavior of some of the people they thought they knew, so politics, too can be expected to provide the unexpected now and then. But how do you explain an Eliot Spitzer? I wish I could provide an answer here but the subject of the election of stone cold losers doesn't come with any. It just comes with one big question for those who put them in office: What were you thinking?