Normal service to be resumed soon. In the meantime, Daniel and Jack continue their series on movies about the presidency by considering Oliver Stone's baffling 2008 movie W., an aggressively irrelevant and annoyingly whimsical dramady biopic of blood-soaked war criminal George W. Bush. The movie stars Josh Brolin as the charming mass murderer, and a host of respected American actors doing impressions of neocon profiteer warmongers in what looks weirdly like a bloated SNL sketch. Both your hosts find their dusty old rage about the 'War on Terror' (and the myriad other vicious and authoritarian horrors of the Bush administration) suddenly reawakened. Links to clips included: Naomi Klein on the Iraq invasion as an orgy of privatisation: Naomi Klein on C-Span: Triple Privatization in the Iraq War Greg Palast on the Republican conspiracy to rig the 2000 for Bush in Florida: The 2000 Election Vice on corporate profits from the Iraq invasion: Was the War in Iraq All About Profit? | WHILE THE REST OF US DIE Brown University report on the death toll of the Bush wars: Costs of War: the Human Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
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Challenges?
Many.
Rewards?
Numerous.
Failure?
Possible.
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The American people.
The few chosen have been the presidents.
Welcome back, listeners, to another bonus IDSG on movies about the presidents.
And we're ruthlessly back on topic this time with a movie actually about a president, in the sense of somebody who was the president.
So it actually is how it's advertised this time.
Daniel, how the hell are you?
I've had some things in my personal life.
I'm up to 9,500 subscribers or followers on Blue Sky, which is pretty astonishing because I think I was at like 700 two weeks ago.
So anybody who's finding me on Blue Sky and finds this podcast is the first one that they hear of me.
Welcome.
This is not our normal fare, but yeah.
So that's kind of the big positive thing.
None of that, like, this is the first bonus about the presidency that we've recorded since the election.
So that's probably going to play into a little bit of what we might end up talking about here.
And then, you know, shit in my personal life.
I did lose a 20-year-old beloved feline companion a couple of days ago.
But, you know, we're pressing on.
We're definitely going to avoid that and talk about the much more benign topic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq today.
So yeah, I think that's where we need to go.
Well, much love to Phoebe the Cat, wherever she is now.
I've been through it myself many times, so much love to you over that one.
It sucks.
It really does suck.
Yeah.
You know, they're part of your life.
They're part of your family.
They're lifelong friends sometimes.
And yeah, I know how you're feeling.
And yeah, I was going to hit the Blue Sky thing myself, because my Blue Sky follower count has just exploded in the last few days.
I presume because I'm on, and this is probably true, well, I'm sure it's true of you as well, we're in what they call starter packs now on Blue Sky.
Yes.
I mean, I know for a fact that Teddy Wilson, Radical Reports, who former guest on IDSG, that the excellent Teddy Wilson, I know that we're both in the starter pack he put together of far-right researchers.
And I tell you, it really does aggravate the imposter syndrome to be scrolling down through these names, you know.
And then your name's in the result.
My name is what I mean.
My name's in the result.
I don't belong in this list.
Look at these people.
But yeah, I'm in it.
And yeah, my follower count has exploded.
So it is conceivable that there are people tuning into this bonus who have never...
I hope, actually, if people are starting with IDSG because they've just ditched X and they've come to Blue Sky and they've encountered you and I in that sort of I'm hoping that they've encountered the Trump wins episode first, although that's not really a typical episode for us either.
But yeah, no, I think this will be fine.
I think this will be fine as an introduction.
Yeah, no, no, definitely.
Because we're talking about movies, and there's a real paucity of white guys on the internet doing podcasts about movies.
So we're going to redress that desperate shortage.
No, absolutely.
We're the only one.
We're the only news podcast.
No, no.
Somewhere News is the only news podcast, and we're the only movie podcast.
So, yeah, we are going to be talking about the 2008 Oliver Stone, I guess, Biodrama W. This was released just a few days before the 2008 election.
At the point at which literally everybody in the world was sick to fucking death of George W. Bush.
And talking about George W. Bush.
The perfect time to release a film about this man was two weeks before the election of Barack Obama.
I think you watched this for the first time for this podcast recently.
Yes, indeed.
This film, which I think it's hilarious to refer to as W brackets W end brackets, which is what it says on the poster.
Yeah, I studiously avoided this at the time because I... And this is complicated because I would say that Oliver Stone's Nixon is probably one of my all-time favorite movies.
People that listen to this...
This show before, know that.
On some days, it's even my all-time favorite movie.
I think it's, as history, it's complete wingnut nonsense, but I love it as a film.
And I love lots of Oliver Stone movies, despite my very, very deep, and especially as the years have gone by, very, very deep and profound problems and disagreements and differences and criticisms of Mr. Stone, who is basically wrong about everything that he thinks.
Right.
At least in detail.
He's more or less gone full tanky at this point, you know?
Yeah, it's pretty awful.
And again, something else we've said many times on this show is that you and I both used to be believers in the conspiracy version of the Kennedy assassination, and we have both, you know, as we've grown up, I mean, I know that you are a Oswald-acted-alone guy, and so am I. So, yeah, JFK, as much as it's a fascinating, intriguing movie, as history, like Nixon, it's complete bollocks.
I had no...
And you would think, given that I like lots of Oliver Stone movies, I think Natural Born Killers is a really interesting movie, you would think that I would have wanted to see this.
When it came out, I had no interest in seeing it whatsoever.
And it's difficult, actually, for me to put my finger on why, but it's a film that I studiously avoided, and I've studiously avoided ever since.
And I had to kind of force myself to watch it for this.
And even then, as we were saying before we started recording, I've only watched it to a given value of the term watched or seen, because what I did was I put it on in the corner while I was doing something else and just allowed it to be on.
I do not like this film.
I knew I wouldn't like it.
All those years ago, I knew I wouldn't like it, and I did not.
I love the dedication you give to your patrons there, Jack.
I do appreciate that.
Yeah, it's a heroic effort.
I don't much care for this film either.
I did see this theatrically.
I was still in that kind of phase of being fascinated with pretty much everything that Oliver Stone did.
Let me rephrase that, because I didn't see a lot of the stuff he made.
Like the last film of his, because if you look at his career, he kind of has this...
I've got his filmography open in front of me now.
Kind of the early stuff is all...
You know, he was a writer on Conan the Barbarian.
He was a writer on Scarface.
You know, his first movies to direct, I mean, they were...
He did, like, you know, movies about, you know, about military juntas in El Salvador.
And, you know, his first kind of big...
Salvador's a really good film.
I love Salvador.
Yeah, I mean, like, let's look at his, like, early stuff.
It's like Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July.
Talk Radio is really good.
Yeah, yeah.
That's a list of classic films.
And those are his earliest films.
Then you get something like The Doors, which is a little bit more...
JFK is a giant hit.
I mean, it's a brilliant film that's completely wrong.
It's a brilliant film.
He comes back and he does Heaven and Earth, which I haven't seen, but I've heard is really interesting.
Natural Born Killers, which we've mentioned, and Nixon, which again, I agree with everything you said about the film Nixon.
Get me on a good day, it's my favorite film of all time.
But it's got deep, deep problems, this history.
Yeah.
And then he does a few more, like, sorry, I'm not running through the whole thing, but, you know, he does U-Turn, which is like a Sean Penn vehicle from 1997. And then, like, Any Given Sunday, which is a movie in which he takes those, like, the vertical editing techniques that he made famous in JFK and Nixon and Natural Born Killers and applies them to the world of professional football in the United States.
I can barely hear the title of that film mentioned without giggling.
I never saw that one all the way through.
I caught it on pink cable at one point, you know?
And I mean, there are sequences that are just mind-numbing of like, wow, like this is, I mean, it is an experience.
I'm going to sit down and listen.
I'm really going to sit down and watch that one day.
Maybe we do that as a podcast.
I think that would be a fun one, you know?
But then after that, you really get to where he does Alexander.
He does World Trade Center.
He does Commandante, which is a documentary.
But he gets to be more of a director for hire.
After Any Given Sunday, you really don't feel him as a director in the same way.
I don't know if he gets older and he's just more tired or if he's just kind of what the issue is.
You know, he does the Snowden film, which, you know, if you watch that and you said, oh, that's directed by Oliver Stone, you would never guess it's directed by Oliver Stone, you know?
And I think, like, at this point with W, I was kind of like, again, as being like a giant fan of those earlier films about presidents, I was like, oh, this could be, I mean, this could be really something good.
And the trailers didn't, like, give me any sense of that, but I think I didn't even really watch the trailers.
It was like, Oliver Stone president movie, I'm there opening weekend.
So I saw this theatrically.
I don't know if I went opening weekend, but I saw it theatrically.
And boy, parts of this, I mean, it feels more like an SNL sketch that would have been made around the time than it does an Oliver Stone movie.
And I think that it's just like, it's just, you know, he's just, you know, he's phoning it in here.
You know, there's really very little here that has any kind of forward momentum at all.
And production-wise or, you know, direction-wise, I mean, or editing-wise, it's just like, you know, it's just There's just nothing there to it.
There are moments peppered through it where you can see Oliver Stone peeking out.
But for the most part, this is not what you think of when you think of an Oliver Stone movie.
If you showed this to somebody and you hid the credits and they had no context and you said, who made this movie?
I don't think many people would say Oliver Stone.
Yeah, I mean, it might as well be like a Ron Howard or just like generic, you know, just a generic director.
You know, it doesn't, you know, there's nothing, it doesn't, it doesn't use his kind of cinematic language.
It doesn't use the grammar.
It doesn't, it's not even as like hard hitting as he normally is.
Because in the early days, he doesn't, you know, he doesn't do that in Platoon.
He doesn't do that kind of thing.
But there's a, there's a real like narrative there.
And it helps it like he wrote Platoon, you know, and he co-wrote a bunch of the stuff.
Early in his career.
And here, I mean, I guess he has a hand in the script.
I don't know if he's not credited as a writer here, but I mean, this is very much like he's adapting somebody else's script.
And I think that that speaks to something.
Interestingly, a couple of pages from the script were leaked before the movie was out, a few months before release or something.
And I don't know what version of the script it is.
It's much It's like the opening scene of W, but it's more like we're in the Oval Office, and it's like we're planning the war in Iraq, but we're doing it like it's set like a beach party movie.
It's like, grab the brewskis, we're going to get the girls, and we're going to bomb Iraq.
That's the sort of thing where I'm like, Oliver Stone's going to knock this out of the fucking park.
That's...
That's exactly the sort of thing that you would think Oliver Stone's going to bring his A-game to.
And they must have softened this script, or maybe that was a false leak or something.
But there are moments that have real energy here.
There are moments that the film does come alive.
But for the most part, it's very flat, and it's very nothing film.
What is this movie about, is always the question I ask.
I don't know.
I don't know why this film exists.
I don't know why anybody made this.
I don't know.
What's it trying to do?
What's it trying to say?
As I say, there are moments where Oliver Stone sort of peeps out.
You know, what we think of as Oliver Stone.
A viewpoint.
Let's put it that way.
A viewpoint sort of puts its fingers around the edge of the curtain and pulls the curtain slightly and sort of peeps out through the gap and whispers to you.
But most of the time, it's...
It just strikes me, like, what is the earthly point in 2007-2008 of doing a biopic where you're dramatizing the moment that George W. Bush meets his future wife, whatever her name is?
Who gives a shit about how they met?
Well, it's like it's partly this story.
I mean, it's like there are several movies fighting it out on screen.
It's kind of like where I landed.
This is like a chronic thing of this podcast is that we got delayed three times in doing this recording, partly because of the election results.
It's like, well, we can't talk about the election results.
We can't use our recording slot.
Yeah, the first episode we put out after the election is about the 2008 movie.
Yeah, no, that's definitely not something we're going to do.
No, um, so in my, usually what I try to do is like, watch the movie, like rewatch the movie right before we record, like the day before or a day before that.
So that way I've had it, it was kind of in my head.
I've got it like, you know, and I'm, you know, so then I ended up watching it two or three times.
In addition to the time I saw it theatrically, which I hadn't seen it since then.
And I had, like, very few, like, solid memories of it from then, except, like, again, it feels like an instant SNL sketch, you know, that doesn't have the jokes.
And there are some reasons behind that.
We'll talk about that when we get to casting.
To the extent that there are jokes in SNL sketches.
I suppose maybe it was a little better back then, I don't know.
It was a little better in 2008. You know, I kind of think of it as...
Anyway, so I ended up watching this several times, and I realized, like, it's incoherent on it.
Structurally, what the movie is trying to do is it's trying to do something actually pretty interesting.
It's comparing the 1991 invasion or the Operation Desert Storm, the invasion of Kuwait to drive back Saddam, and then the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both of which are perpetrated by some of the same individual people. both of which are perpetrated by some of the same In fact, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell are both – it is a direct through line, and it's shown in the movie, right?
And both done by presidents named George Bush.
Just one of them is the son of the other, you know?
And it's using that as a way of kind of talking about, like, it's suggesting that the reason that W does this, the reason that he is a hardliner on this, is because of his background with his father and never feeling like he lived up to the promise that his brother Jeb showed.
And it's always him trying to get out from under his father's shadow and from his brother's shadow.
And so it turns this story into this kind of like psycho drama about George W. Bush.
And that's why it opens with the, you know, it opens and closes on like a vision, like a dream that George W. Bush is having.
We're standing in center field and missing a fly ball because, you know, that was in the middle of the film.
He says, like, this is my place of comfort or something like that.
It's like, this is where I go to get peace of mind and just walk around center field.
And, you know, it's like his special place.
And Yeah, so it's doing, that's the structure of the film.
I don't think that's arguable.
I think that's exactly what the film is structured to do.
But it's also trying to be a comedy about, like, all the stupid things that George W. Bush did in his life.
You know, around this era, particularly in, like, 2001, 2002, there were books like The Bush Dyslexicon, which just had, you know, all these, all the quotes, all the, you know, is our children learning, you know, and all that sort of thing.
The Bush malapropisms, it was just a book of those, you know.
Which, you know, now looks so desperately quaint.
I mean, can you imagine a book like that for Donald Trump?
It would be the size of the Brothers Karamazov, you know, in fine print, onion skin pages.
Exactly, exactly.
It's basically everything he's ever said or written.
Yeah, we just held a microphone up to Donald Trump and just transcribed it for two hours, and that's the book.
So it's doing that.
It's doing kind of the light comedy with that kind of stuff.
And it's trying to do the traditional biopic stuff of, like, you're right, his introduction to Laura Bush at a backyard barbecue.
And his history of failing to hold a job and his conversion to evangelical Christianity after he quits drinking.
It's kind of the same process, right?
About his 40th birthday.
And so it's kind of doing three movies in one, in a way.
And none of them are particularly compelling.
It's just there.
A lot of it is just there.
I agree.
Loads of it's just there.
You get a scene where he quits a job working on an oil rig.
And I'm like, well...
Why?
Why is that there?
I mean, okay, I understand you're telling me he's a bit of a goof-off, and he can't hold a job, and he's got a problem with authority, and yeah, I mean, and?
So what?
I mean, I don't know, why is that of any interest to anybody?
Especially when there are so many things that you could be talking about, and arguably should be talking about, that are just not in this film.
You know, I'm rejecting the premise of this film because I just fundamentally don't care.
He feels that his father is disappointed in him.
I don't care.
Why should that be of any interest to me?
I don't care.
I think what the film is trying to suggest is that that's what caused the ultimate failures in Iraq, and that's what caused some of the failures in his presidency, is that he just couldn't let his father win that internal war.
But A, I don't think that's historically accurate, and B, I don't think it's dramatically accurate in the film.
I mean, certainly the sense of his father's failure to win re-election after the end of the Gulf War, and the ability of Saddam to continue to be a dictator in Iraq and not get his ass whooped by the Americans, that's certainly something that was driving George W. Bush.
But I remember reading a bunch of biographies of Bush at this time, and this idea that he was constantly...
Trying to get out from under his father's shadow in some way.
I mean, that's hagiography.
That's telling the story that Bush would probably want to tell him, not the real story of he coated on his father's coattails for his entire life.
And that's deliberately stated in the film by Laura Bush, by Elizabeth Banks, who is one of the most lovely actresses.
I just love Elizabeth Banks.
She is quite good here.
Actually, I think almost all the performances are quite good.
That's one of the things that's interesting about the film is it is well acted.
If you were given this material to work with, they did the best job they can.
It's just the material they have to work with is scrap.
But no, Elizabeth Banks even tells him, look...
Being a Bush has advantages, Debbie, and he just seems to not be able to get that through his head in the movie.
He's always like an overgrown child.
We did the J.D. Vance, we did Hillbilly Elegy, and I was talking about the...
You know, the sparkling water sequence in the book.
And I'm thinking a whole lot of this.
I can say this for Oliver Stone's W. It was not as bad as Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy.
No, no.
It's better than the last one we did.
It's better than that.
It's significantly better than that.
That one was actively painful.
This one was just paint drying, but...
You know, he does have these moments.
He does have these moments of, like, you know, they constantly show him, like, he eats.
When he's introduced to Laura, but who will become Laura Bush?
When he's introduced to Elizabeth Banks, he's at a barbecue, and, like, he's chewing with his mouth open.
He's eating a cheeseburger, like a really bad over-toot hamburger in a Texas backyard.
Barbecue in 1971 or whatever.
And he's eating with his mouth open.
And it's just like, you know, is this...
I mean, it did remind me of that, like, sparkling water thing of just, like, is this how we're, like, we're portraying a, you know, this at-the-time sitting president as, you know, we're treating it to this?
Because, again, that's not something that I remember, like, you know, that he chews with his mouth open, you know?
And he does it when he's president as well.
He does it in an early scene.
He's talking to Dick Cheney, who's played, I think, again, brilliantly by Richard Dreyfuss.
He's eating a sandwich, and he's, again, chewing with his mouth open.
I don't know.
Maybe that was something that George W. Bush is known for.
I never remember hearing anything about that, but the fact that it's shown multiple times is kind of just...
It's a bizarre choice.
It's bizarre.
You have to turn him into a hillbilly so that the audience won't like him as much, and yet you cast Joss Brolin, who is among the most likable actors on the planet.
You know?
And he's giving it his full, like, cowboy charm here.
But that's the myth, isn't it?
As you say, you're buying, you know, George Bush's own story about himself, his own myth about himself.
This myth about him as like this down-home, rural, cowboy-type figure.
No.
He's a blue blood from a zillionaire business family.
You know, his father was...
George Bush Sr. was the director of the CIA, I think, at one point.
You know, he grew up pampered, secluded, and sequestered from the rest of the...
You know, yeah, I'm sure as a young man he probably wore cowboy boots once.
That doesn't...
And the film can't square this circle either.
The Bush image can't square this circle.
It just relies upon people not questioning it and just taking it on faith.
That's going, oh, I'll answer your question and then watch my hunting dog get this armadillo.
It relies on performance and nobody questioning the performance.
When you actually go into it, you can't square this idea of him as this You know, nacho and beer-swilling cowboy hat-wearing hillbilly-type character with who he actually is.
And the film can't do that either.
The film has the two versions just put on screen completely straight-facedly, apparently sincerely, and they don't connect to each other.
Yeah, I mean, a more interesting version of this film, and I think the film is suggesting...
Okay, I'm being too fair to the film.
The film, if it does suggest this, it is not at all obvious or clear.
A better film would suggest that this is, in some sense, a character that W is playing.
That he is sort of the black sheep of the family.
He does drink too much.
is oh also like the level of alcoholism alcoholism in this film is like through the roof like when you have a character like chugging from a bottle of Jack Daniels and like three successive scenes at one point while behind the wheel of a car this is this is not real alcoholism this is movie alcoholism okay yeah yeah this is uh anyway while behind the wheel of a car.
This is, this is not real alcoholism.
This is movie alcoholism.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a, anyway, to suggest that this is a character that he's putting on that you could show him like not really getting along with his father, being the black sheep of the family, not really fitting in either in Texas or in Connecticut, like not really having, having feet in both worlds to a certain extent and then show like, you know, after he loses that election having feet in both worlds to a certain extent and then show like, you know, after he loses that election in the 1977 when he's, you know, I'm Like that's, that's a real line that he said.
I don't think he said it at that point, but like, that's a real thing that like is, is dead is noted that he, that he, you know, at least he believed about himself kind of moving forward his political Well, that tells you a lot about how George W. Bush goes on to become president.
That tells you a lot about how he's fitting into this Republican Party of the late 90s and early 2000s.
tells you a lot about his political instincts and about like his growing as a, as a, as a, as a person, as a politician, as, as, as a character.
And I, I have served no indication of anything that he is not like actually born a green Christian, that he, that he, that was a deliberate and active life choice that he made.
And I'm not criticizing that in the slightest, but it's also very politically, politically advantageous for him at that time in 1986, right when that movement was growing in power and growing in steam.
And that's, I mean, it's somewhat in the film.
You have a couple of scenes of it, but it's the idea that, like, this character is something that he's putting on for his politics, that he's putting on for power.
That's I think more accurate and would make it certainly a much better film.
And it would square that circle and say, no, this is, he's always, he's putting this on, this is political theater.
This is just a lifelong form of political theater.
Yeah, and the film seems to be going there as well at one point, doesn't it?
Because you have the relationship developing between W and Karl Rove, played by Toby Jones, because it's 2008 and Toby Jones has to be in every movie by law.
I realize this is at least the third film that we've done with Toby Jones at this point.
And we're not deliberately picking films with Toby Jones.
He's always the guy who gets paid a working actor's salary to come in and be brilliant at doing the weird guy with the funny accent.
That's who you get in these kinds of movies.
It's not deliberate.
We're not doing a stealth Toby Jones season.
It's just happening.
As I say, it was actually a legal requirement.
You had to have Toby Jones in films like this.
At this point in time, it was international law.
Yes, they seem to be going there with the, of course, you know, breaking international law.
What's wrong with that?
You can do that if you want.
But no, they seem to be going there.
But at the same time, that's strangely muted, that theme in the film of Karl Rove sort of becoming his Political eminence gris.
He's not really advising him on anything except how to handle questions from reporters.
It's a weirdly, you know, because he's got this unfortunate way of getting his words tangled, which the film plays on several times, recontextualizing quotes and things.
But it's a weirdly, I don't know, it's a weirdly sort of milquetoast mainstream view of things, isn't it?
You have the hostile press, and if you want to get on in politics, you have to be able to field questions.
No, that's not the story of Karl Rove and George W. Bush.
I mean, the story of Karl Rove and George W. Bush is the Willie Horton ad, you know?
Yeah, well, that's it.
I mean, it's in the film, and George Bush Sr. is like, oh, this is rough stuff.
There's even a moment where Karl Rove calls him Poppy and wants his name.
And Bush, God, I forgot the name of the actor very briefly.
Sorry, that's...
James Cromwell?
James Cromwell, yes.
I knew I was on the tip of my tongue.
I love James Cromwell.
He's so great.
He's great.
He's a weird pick for this, but he's great in it, you know?
But he gives him the side eye, you know?
I mean, you know, that's one of the funny little moments, but it's just a funny little moment.
It doesn't show, like, you know, they called Karl Rove Bush's brain.
Like, that was the nickname that...
He was given, like, in the press at this time, and in the early 2000s, I think even when W was governor of Texas, he was kind of known as Bush's Brain.
And because he's the guy behind the scenes kind of pulling all the policy levers and doing the real work, whereas, you know, W, as Karl Rove says in the film, you know, you're the finest piece of political horseflesh I've ever seen, you know, but you haven't done anything in your life.
You know, it's a fascinating relationship in real life.
And it's interesting enough that it can't help but be portrayed at some point in this film, but that should have been much closer to the core of the film.
That should have been a lot more about what this is about, is this political invention of this character, George W. Bush, and the people around him.
That's far more interesting and far more important than this father-son relationship.
Yeah.
Yeah, the Willie Horton bit is good, and it's one of those bits I was talking about before where, you know, the more interesting, more confrontational, more Oliver Stone, if you like, film sort of peeps in from outside, but never quite comes in.
Yeah, it's a strange one.
Cromwell is old casting for Bush Sr. as well.
He's far too imposing.
He's far too grave and scary and charismatic.
This gets at something that I started...
Again, when you watch the movie three times, you have to start fancasting it a little bit, or you have to start thinking about...
Yeah.
And one of the things that I ran into when I was re-watching it is, like, the film, like, there's a reading of this film in which...
There's a much better screen portrayal of George Bush Sr. in The Naked Gun 2 1⁄2.
Oh, I haven't seen that in so many years, but...
Whenever I think of portrayals of Poppy Bush, I can never not go Dana Carvey because I just watched all that SNL back in the early 90s.
Well, I watched it a few years later when they re-ran it in syndication on Comedy Central, but I just can't imagine George Bush Sr. without thinking of Dana Carvey.
It's such a classic, but...
There's a reading of this film in which the conflict between W and Poppy is entirely in W's head.
Because every time we see George Bush Sr. without W in the scene with him...
And many times with him in the scene with him, there's a real respect that he gives him.
I'm thinking about the scene with the cufflinks, where after W is inaugurated to be governor of Texas, he gives him, I forget exactly what it was, it's like your great-grandfather's cufflinks, and you wear them with pride, etc.
And he's giving him this fine gift, and as is his way, he writes a note about what they are, instead of speaking of it verbally.
And W, in the film, he kind of sees with rage.
It's like, why can't he say this to me in person?
He was sad for Jeb because Jeb lost his election and I won mine.
Like, there's a very real sense in which, like, all of this is in your goddamn head, W. Yeah, you're insisting upon this, and it's not really happening.
Right.
But I think you have to get someone like Cromwell to play this version of Poppy, or otherwise, like, James Brolin would, like, if it was Dana Carvey, imagine it's Dana Carvey, you know?
You know, Josh Brolin would, like, stand head and shoulders over Dana Carvey, you know?
The idea that he's intimidated by this little runt of a band.
No offense to Dana Carvey, of course, but you know what I mean.
The idea that he's intimidated is not...
James Cromwell, he looks like he could get in a scrap.
One of my favorite Cromwells is LA Confidential, which we've done previously as one of these.
You know, he's just, he's just, he, I mean, he can play a hard ass and he plays a pretty good hard ass here.
And I don't know what the reality of, you know, some of the, you know, some of the bits, some of the private bits between, you know, George Bruce Sr. and W. were in terms of, you know, his drinking and roughhousing and, you know, that kind of stuff.
And, you know, I would presume there is that there is an implied threat regardless of the physical menace, but, you know, that moment where he's like, I'm going to take you outside and tan your hide, boy.
It's like, yeah, I think in real life, this did not play quite like that.
Yeah.
Perhaps you can tell me something, because I wasn't entirely sure.
As I say, I had this on in the corner while I was doing something else, because it was the only way I could bear to watch it.
So I might have missed this, but does Jeb Bush actually appear in this film, or is he just talked about?
No, he's just talked about.
I do not believe he ever appears in the film, no.
That I like.
I like Jeb being this constant, unseen, looming presence.
Partly because I think it's quite clever dramatically.
And secondly, because I love the idea of Jeb Bush, of all people in the world, being portrayed as this dark shadow that's off on the sidelines cast over somebody's life.
Please clap.
I mean, but there's a story there as well, because Jeb represents a much cleaner line from, like, the Poppy Bush, from the George Bush Sr., that kind of old-school Connecticut Republican, you know, kind of this idea of Republicanism.
Whereas W represents much more, like, sort of where the party went, which is, you know, Reagan, Bush, and then, of course, Trump.
Like, this is before...
Trump was anything politically.
But, you know, there's a throughline there in terms of, like, these kind of big, brash, dumb, you know, dumb idiots who, you know, just to get by on Trump.
And the throughline, you know, one name for that throughline is Karl Rove.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, and more to the point, Lee Atwater, whose name, I don't think he's ever spoken.
Lee Atwater is another name for it, yeah.
I mean, there's a real, and I, you know, it's, there's, you know, there's an old movie critics adage of, like, you know.
Roger Stone is another.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, there's an old movie critics adage of, you know, you should critique the movie they made and not the movie they didn't make, you know?
Like, you know, you should take the film as it is.
But we're kind of, like, we've done that.
We've kind of said, like, this is kind of limp artistically.
This is not, like, doing very much, you know, for me.
And so, like, rewriting it is kind of like saying, like, there's the core of a film here.
Like, that's what I mean by there's a skeleton of something interesting you could do with this material.
And I don't think it's even a bad idea to make the parallel invasions of Iraq or the parallel wars in the Middle East as defining attributes of this kind of father-son dynamic.
I just think it's pushed way in this kind of hagiographic direction.
It's pushed so much to the forefront of the film that a much more interesting story that could be being told isn't being told.
And it feels like a fundamental failure.
The more I think about the film, the more I think it's like, this was a real missed opportunity.
You had this level of talent making this, making this, and making and doing what, again, to me feels very much like an extended SNL sketch.
It's just, you know, it's so much of it is just, you know, we're so much of it also like we're picking and choosing like the, you know, like sort of the classic bits of the W presidency.
We're going...
We get the pretzel scene as dramatized, you know, where he almost chokes on a pretzel.
You know, they didn't do him falling off a segue.
That would have been funny, but they did that.
They did the, you know, the scene.
God, I'm trying to...
Where they're wandering around and they're talking about the war and they get lost in the field, right?
Which is something that actually happened.
There's a whole lot of bits where it's kind of the classic W. Bush lore of the stuff that every liberal blog was always referring to all this stuff.
And a bunch of those scenes are like...
That's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what it feels like.
It feels like liberal blog Bush administration lore turned into a film.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, well, we have to put this in, but you don't have to put that in.
Like, what are you trying to say with the pretzel scene?
Except, like, it's, you know, I guess it leads into a flashback, but it's still like, you know, I don't know.
It just feels so disjointed.
Like, again, they could have found a through line and really made something out of this.
And instead, you know, they just don't.
Yeah.
And, you know, I don't want to comb over as if I'm being moralistic about this, but you're talking about one of the most consequential presidencies of the 20th and 21st centuries.
It's the 20th, entirely 21st, isn't it?
I mean, there are so many atrocities and crimes that we could and should be talking about.
9-11 is referred to.
The level of staggering, malignant incompetence involved in stepping down the security measures that were in place that allowed that to happen...
That's gross negligence.
You have Jeb Bush and various people involved in the Bush campaign and the Republican Party in Florida putting black voters off the rolls with the shenanigans with the names and getting people knocked off the rolls because their name might sound like the name of somebody who has been to prison in order to gerrymander the Florida election.
We're getting reports from our BBC crews in Florida You see one blackface after another saying, I tried to vote, I couldn't vote.
My name wasn't on the voter rolls.
Again and again.
And so I'm thinking that there's like a computer program that's reaching in and erasing black names, names of black voters off the voter rolls.
And so I thought I'd show you the program, which I got from Katherine Harris's office.
There it is.
See?
This is it.
This is what elected your president.
And what this is, I had to crack this.
I got volunteers, you know, some lefty geeks, thanks, who took these two CD-ROMs I got out of Kate's office and threw it into an Excel spreadsheet.
And lo and behold, there's 57,700 names of people that she ordered removed from the voter rolls five months before the election.
One of four lists, as it turns out.
Now, what's the reason?
The reason is that they're all criminals.
Bad guys who are not allowed to vote because if you have a felony conviction in Florida, you can't vote there.
Lo and behold, there's people on it like Thomas Cooper.
And Cooper is convicted of a felony.
He was convicted of a felony on January 30th, 2007. 500 criminals of the future on this list.
Remember, Al Gore lost officially by 537 votes in Florida.
500 criminals of the future.
You go through this list, over 90.2% of the people on this list are innocent of any crime.
But not just any old.
They were guilty of something.
I'm going to read this to you.
The right column, BLA, BLA, W-H-I, BLA, BLA, W-H-I, W-H-I, B-L-A. The race of the voter is right next to their name.
Over half the voters, 54% on this list, were black and innocent.
And targeted, and they lost their vote.
A mistake?
That was last defense.
A mistake.
Well, I went back and I got the email traffic from inside the Florida Department of Elections.
And lo and behold, there was a clerk who said, my God, we're taking away the civil rights of people who are convicted in the future.
What do we do?
According to the Republican functionaries running the office, they wrote back, If you blank out the conviction dates, no one will know.
There are 4,000 blank conviction dates.
So who came up with this wonderful racial list?
Well, first there was a company that was paid $5,000 to come up with the list, and they were fired.
Then there was a bid put out.
The bids were thrown out.
And the highest bidder was given the job without a bid.
The first company was paid $5,000.
The new company was paid $2 million.
Caught my eye.
The excuse was, after I was snooping around, I said, how did that happen?
The excuse was, they said, that this other company can verify so we don't catch innocent people.
And so we've hired them because they have a database of 16 billion records, Choice Point, whose board looks like a Republican country club luncheon, including such Republican sugar daddies as Ken Langone, who was, I think, arrested this week for stock fraud, by the way.
He picked the president.
You shouldn't be laughing.
You have the Supreme Court just handing the election to Bush when it was pretty clear from the numbers.
There are controversies around the 2004 general election as well.
You know, the invasion of Iraq is a, the invasion of Afghanistan is a staggering war crime.
The invasion of Iraq is another staggering war crime.
And it's treated, for the most part, it's treating, if these things are even mentioned at all, they're treated with an incredible casual lightness, almost like we're watching background details in a, in a sort of comedy drama.
Right, right.
It's baffling, to be honest.
And it's kind of offensive.
I mean, the war on terror was an almost unprecedented global war crime that cost millions of lives.
Yeah.
I could have talked about these things in a lot more detail back then than I can now, you know, because the books that I had are all in cardboard boxes at the back of the cupboard, and my memory has faded.
But yeah, as somebody who was on those anti-war marches, it's kind of baffling to see it treated in this way.
Right.
And as someone who read all those liberal blogs at the time, because I was a, you know, as Jack knows, and I think the regular audience knows, I am a recovering liberal.
I was a very insufferable Democrat for, like, a leader in my life that I would like to admit.
But, you know, man, those days, man, remember when it felt good to be a Democrat?
Like, that's, man, those are, that's been a while, you know, that's been a long time.
But, uh, No, I think, you know, you mentioned both the 2000 election, which is just not portrayed in this movie at all.
The movie skips right over.
I mean, it skips basically right over from the 96, 94?
94 election.
No, the 96 election.
When he becomes governor of Texas, it skips directly from that into, like, the planning for the Iraq War to 2003. Well, and it obliquely mentions some of these other things, but, like, this is...
Well, A, the film doesn't touch domestic policy at all.
All the failures in terms of massive giveaways to corporations, massive cutting of regulations, the elevation of an explicitly evangelical Christianity worldview into American politics and into the Supreme Court appointments, the elevation of an explicitly evangelical Christianity worldview into American politics and into the
I mean, again, not to say the film has to do that, but it skips over so much stuff that's important to telling the story of the George W. Bush presidency.
In favor of doing this kind of daddy drama and the meet-cute stuff with Laura Bush and all the other stuff.
I mean, there's this extended sequence with a girl who apparently he was engaged or he was briefly engaged to this girl.
And apparently they remained lifelong friends.
So the film makes it sound like Poppy's going to just pay this girl off and put a stop to it.
Disappear her.
Just disappear her.
Yeah.
I'm going to send it to a CIA black site.
Believe me, I have guys.
It's kind of portrayed that way or something.
It almost portrays the Bushes the way conservatives were portraying the Clintons at the same time.
We have an extended scene.
And I mean, again, it's a charming scene, but what's it doing in this movie?
Like, it's just, I mean, Josh Brolin is putting on the charm.
And I believe that W had this relationship with this girl, but like, it's just five minutes out of this movie.
It's just completely wasted.
What are we doing with this?
You know, what is this trying to tell us?
Even if you just want to do the personal stuff, it downplays the alcoholism.
It doesn't portray the DUI where he's pulled over for speeding, absolutely rat-arsed behind the wheel of a car.
It doesn't portray his almost certain cocaine usage.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's probably for legal reasons.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, that very well could be.
Although, you know, Oliver Stone, not a man known to hold back when it comes time to sick the loggers on him.
And nor does it at any point, really, in the story of his born-again conversion, it doesn't go into the actual nature of that faith.
You know, you get quite touching scenes between him and his pastor.
And it's all to do with his personal struggles about alcoholism and approving himself and finding a direction in life and stuff.
It doesn't get into the actual ideology that this man subscribes to, which is rabidly homophobic and absolute sort of, you know, by any reasonable standards, just absolute wingnut stuff.
You know...
This was a man that went to the UN and talked about Gog and Magog to bemused international politicians.
Right, right.
They treat that as just like it's another malapropism, it's another one to just...
C minus George W. Bush.
No, no.
This is actual crazy talk.
This is what he actually believes.
This is real shit.
No, absolutely.
Again, it leaves all of this on the table.
It leaves all this stuff out.
Again, taking in isolation the very touching scene of this man who has become born again, who has quit drinking, and is like, I'm never going to live up to my father and my brother's legacy.
I'm talking to his pastor, who, by the way, this is an amalgam character.
This is supposed to represent Billy Graham and John Hagee, and there were a bunch of spiritual advisors, George W. Bush, that just get wrapped into this one character.
But that's another really huge story.
It's the way that Bush's personal story feeds into this growing evangelical movement that eventually pushes him to the presidency, almost completely absent from this film.
But there's this scene, again, taken in isolation.
It's very effective.
It's well-acted.
It's And, like, the message that this guy has, that this minister has, is something like, I want you to go every day for the rest of your life and treat every person you see as if they're going to die at midnight.
And you'll bring out the kindness in your heart, and then, like, you know...
What I really wish is they didn't cut to the Willie Horton ad scene.
Because that would have happened a year later or something.
A year and a half later.
We're cutting the Willie Horton ad.
Are you treating Willie Horton as someone who might die?
No, of course not.
It's abject cruelty.
Not that we need to have great sympathy for someone who committed that horrible crime, but you know what I'm trying to say here?
You go to this rat-fucking-politics And we're supposed to think this is a man who has changed.
This is a man who has reformed.
He's reformed to the degree that he now drinks non-alcoholic beer and Dr. Pepper instead of swigging from bottles of Jack Daniels.
But if anything, at least as he's portrayed in the film, he's significantly more accrued afterwards.
He's kind of a charmer when he's just kind of a bumfuck son of a vice president, you know?
But then when he actually gets political ambition, when he actually starts becoming the George W. Bush who's going to become president, that is a much more sinister human being.
And it's not portrayed that way.
It's just kind of shown on screen.
Yeah, and there are moments in the film.
The film has him sort of sniggering over Guantanamo Bay or Guantanamo Bay.
Guantanamo or something like that, yeah.
Guantanamo, yeah.
And, you know, we won't be hearing from those guys again or something, he says.
And there's a bit where he's talking to General Tommy Franks and he says, you know, don't bomb any schools or hospitals during the day or something like that because it looks bad on the news.
He says, don't bomb schools and hospitals.
And it's like, I hear you on the hospital, sir, but schools, we bomb those at night.
It's like, God, God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, there's these moments where the film suddenly pulls its sword from its scabbard for a couple of seconds.
But it doesn't...
I don't know.
It all feels weirdly not joined up.
Tonally, it's incoherent and its parts don't interact with each other.
They're just there.
Yeah, no, absolutely agreed on that.
And another thing that I actually really liked, I mean, the portrayal of, like, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney here, in the sort of, like, because they represent a certain, like, diametric force in terms of these two wars in the Middle East.
Again, because they're both...
Several other people were present in both, you know, but it's kind of...
of the film uses them as kind of like, like weights against each other.
It's sort of like the, the differing views about how to pursue the future of the war in Iraq, you know?
And I mean, I think the film is, is far too kind to a couple of different people.
I think Colin Powell is one of them.
Mm-hmm.
Jeffrey Wright.
I think it's Jeffrey Wright.
Yeah, it's Jeffrey Wright.
I mean, another brilliant actor.
I think it's a brilliant performance.
Absolutely superb.
I wish this was a movie about Colin Powell and with Jeffrey Wright at the center.
I can imagine that being a much, much better film.
By all...
He did have actual fights internally about his role in the Iraq War, and ultimately, he made the wrong choice.
He got on board when he absolutely should not have.
But also, Colin Powell was still a Republican...
a whole lot of that other stuff that like if he'd run a 96 and beat bill clinton a whole lot of that like domestic policy the w got in in was it was in the making at that time as well like there's just there's just no question that like colin powell was a monster but like here he's portrayed as you know being you know the steady voice in the room and like the you know that ultimately he had he had the right idea and i think you know he's the shoulder angel and cheney is the shoulder Right, right, exactly.
He's also portrayed as being sort of the version of Bush Senior's politics that's still there in Bush Junior's administration, but being crowded out, being shouted down.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, it is – and again, this part of the movie is interesting.
This is actually – like, you know, if this was the movie, if it was a series of conversations in the war room, you know, like if this was Dr. Strangelove style, you know, where we're just like sitting around and we're not doing all the other bullshit, like this is an interesting movie.
Like there's a real narrative here, you know?
It won't come as any surprise to you that my favourite bit of the film is the Cheney speech in the war room, where you get the debate about, you know, what are we actually doing here?
What is the actual plan?
And I believe that there's a fair amount of accuracy there, that people in the room, as these things were being planned, were being swept along by the momentum of Of certain people pushing, and a lot of people were sort of privately thinking, well, what are we actually doing?
I mean, we're doing it, yeah, I'm on board, but what are we doing?
And what are we going to do when we get there?
And how do we get out again?
And stuff like that.
And you get the scene where Colin Powell, I don't know how accurate this is in minutia, but he says...
We're talking about a vast entanglement.
What is our exit strategy?
It's going to have this downside.
It's going to have that downside.
And you get this sort of the Cheney villain speech.
And I think if any real-life politician deserves a villain speech in a movie, I think it's probably Dick Cheney.
But he basically lays out a version of the neocon ideology, the project for the new American century and all that.
We just...
We take over this region.
We have total regional hegemony.
We have access to all these oil fields.
Nobody fucks with us, etc.
He just lays it out.
Yeah, the bond to supervillain to speech is either the highlight or the lowlight of the film, depending on how you want to see it.
It's definitely effective.
Again, it belongs in a different movie.
I can speak a little bit to the accuracy of it.
Oliver Stone, he said in the director's commentary for Nixon, or one of the director's commentaries for Nixon, because there are two on that disc, if you want to watch a four-hour movie three times to watch the movie and then watch two commentaries, you have that option.
And I did it once.
But...
He did say in one of the director's commentaries during the bombing of Cambodia scene in Nixon, where they're making plans to bomb Cambodia, that this scene didn't actually happen this way.
They're not sitting in a circle and having this conversation, but it's taken from documents.
It's taken from actual transcripts of actual things, and then they just sort of dramatize it as a As a moment, because you're making a movie and ultimately you're not, like, typing up a bunch of memos on old typewriters.
Here, the PNAC stuff, the People Project for a New American Century, these were just, like, planning documents that just came along with this neoconservative administration when George W. Bush became president.
I believe this was leaked even before the beginning of the war in Iraq.
Like, I remember around the time of the war.
We knew all about all of this at the time.
Yeah, we knew all this.
Like, again, on those liberal bloggers that I was reading at the time, I'm quoting from the New York Times.
All this was perfectly public.
And the version that the public was sold, the version that W sold to his supporters and to the American people, was the, you know, we got to get in there and kick Saddam out and more of the weapons of mass destruction.
But then they didn't – I mean, I'm sure that was his factor, but they didn't care so much.
It was all about this, we're going to maintain U.S. hegemony over Middle East oil.
And this is the way we're going to do it.
This is the whole Halliburton story.
The word Halliburton is not spoken in this film.
There is no mention of Halliburton.
That is like a criminal, a criminal overlook if you're going to tell the story of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I mean, I'd say it's baffling, but it's not.
I understand exactly how it happened.
I understand the structure of the film.
They're not making that film.
They're making a completely different film.
But it's just like, the better film keeps poking its nose and it keeps showing us what this could have been had there been the will for it.
And there just wasn't in this case.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
The great American General Smedley Butler once said, War is a racket.
And Iraq was definitely a racket.
And the American troops were not in on it.
The American troops had to scrape and scrap for everything, while other guys were getting rich.
While companies like Halliburton were getting no-bid contracts.
Private companies made an estimated $140 billion from the conflict.
Securing lucrative contracts in private security, reconstruction, and oil production.
There were two simultaneous privatization...
Actually, there were three simultaneous privatization agendas going on, swirling around the Iraq War.
There was the one that we could see from Bremer, which he was very open about, you know, riding in and announcing the privatization of the state companies.
There was the longer-term plans to privatize Iraq's oil and the hope that this would spread to surrounding countries.
Because Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, these are all highly protected economies.
And in fact, this is the one part of the world, besides North Korea, that really exists outside of the so-called Washington consensus.
I mean, these are highly, even U.S. allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia, you know, 90% of that economy is controlled by the monarchy.
This is not a free market economy.
So, you know, there were all kinds of, there were ideas that there would be a tsunami of oil privatization in papers written by the American Enterprise Institute at the time explaining this.
But the third level of privatization was inside the military itself.
And this was a huge part of Rumsfeld's transformation vision.
And on September the 10th, 2001, on that fateful day, Donald Rumsfeld unveiled this plan in a town hall meeting at the Pentagon, an extraordinarily controversial speech that he made where he declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy and unveiled a vision for a sort of hollow military.
Basically, he went in there like a sort of new economy CEO that was saying, we're not going to produce products anymore, we're going to produce brands, and we're going to outsource everything.
This is what he was saying to the Pentagon bureaucracy.
He was saying, why are we sorting our own mail?
Why do we have doctors treating soldiers when this can be done by private companies?
He had a huge list of things that were being done in-house that he believed could be done by private companies.
Let's remember that he spent two and a half decades in the private sector.
I argue that he was very much a card-carrying member of what I'm calling the disaster capitalism complex.
He was chair of the board of Gilead Sciences, which is a company that produces AIDS drugs and Tamiflu, which is the treatment of choice for avian flu.
In other words, it's a company that actually profits from the threat of disaster and pandemic.
And he had a vision.
He had this vision of the hollow state.
Cheney was somebody else who, in his role in the private sector, was at the forefront of this radical vision of the hollow state.
He was doing that at Halliburton, the hollowing out of the military campaign in the Balkans.
You had the first stage of what we've seen in Iraq with the fully privatized bases kind of run as Halliburton city-states.
So what I'm arguing in the book is that Plan A was, in fact, To turn Iraq into a model free market economy.
That was the real wish.
But the project was rigged so that it couldn't fail, which is to say that when Plan A turned out to be a drastic miscalculation and Iraqis rejected this and the insurgency began, that because the privatization ethos had entered the heart of the invasion itself under Rumsfeld, Where you had a very downsized army surrounded by contractors.
And as things got worse in Iraq, and Rumsfeld refused to send more troops, that meant that contractors filled the gap.
And you had this very dramatic mission creep that we're continuing to see.
The portrayal of Bush in particular is of somebody who has...
I think what it's going for in its portrayal of him in terms of the Iraq War is that he kind of...
He's portrayed as a naive idealist.
Right, right.
Who's totally imbibed this Reagan rhetoric about democracy and spreading democracy.
And he thinks that what he's doing...
Is this great idealistic crusade to spread democracy through the Middle East and stuff like that.
And he's being...
He's not quite being manipulated, because as I say, Dick Cheney just lays it all out there in this big villain speech in the war room.
But at the same time, they're going through the motions of...
It's like they're performing for him the, oh, here are the latest reports about the WMD. The Brits have this new bit of intel and stuff like that.
And he's just kind of uncritically, oh good, good.
And one of the things that I quite like about the film is the way it just implicitly collapses the distinction between a piece of information comes in that makes our case, it collapses the distinction between that and is this actually true?
If the information comes in and it makes our case in the press and it looks good for the public and it tells the story we want to tell about what we're doing, Then that's good.
There it is.
We put that out.
We rely upon that.
And nobody at any point kind of says, is this reliable?
And I think a version of that kind of did happen.
At the same time, I'm afraid I do not buy the idea of George W. Bush as this naive idealist who doesn't really understand what he's doing.
I don't buy that.
I've never bought that.
That's the gravest sin that the film commits, is that at the end of the day, he's having these nightmares in which he's in Citrafield unable to catch the fly ball because, man, we just don't have those WMDs.
We knew they were there, but they weren't there, and we got bamboozled by Saddam Hussein.
It's like, you didn't care if there were fucking WMDs.
That's just what you were using this to sell to the public.
So the film actually does.
Colin Hanks is David Frum.
I love, man, you know, David Frum is portrayed like relatively neutrally in the film, but he's like, he's, he's kind of like one of a couple of like speechwriters who's like working on this, on this thing.
And they're trying to get in the, this, this yellow cake story from Niger.
They're trying to get, I forget exactly what, I think it was a yellow cake from Niger.
And this is based on, and George Tenet is, you know, kind of going, No, this is faulty.
We can't use this.
We don't have enough sources.
This is a single source thing.
We can't put that into the speech.
And then because W wants to watch...
It's SportsCenter is what he wants.
He wants to watch ESPN. SportsCat comes on at 8, so you got to get this in my hands by 8. And Tenet is like, all right, I got to get some shut-eye.
Tell my guy to call me.
And then when he's out of the office, the other guy just approves it, apparently.
And so it's in.
It's in.
It's suddenly in.
Yeah, no, I don't believe that for a second.
George Sennett eventually, they put pressure on him or he just started to believe it.
He agreed to it.
I don't believe that.
Oh, he was taking a nap or whatever.
It's absurd.
Imagine an Oliver Stone movie in which the director of the CIA is a good guy or a relative good guy.
That feels very, very wrong to me.
Well, this is one of the weird things about this movie because its picture of politics is the complete opposite of Stone's view in stuff like Nixon and JFK, isn't it?
In Nixon and JFK, politics at that level is this vast, occult labyrinth of secrets and powerful actors who are all in control of this gigantic network and at the same time there's this The beast, as it's called in Nixon, you know, the deep state, as a similar ideology calls it now.
Because I do think it's fundamentally the same idea, the same reactionary idea that you find in those Stone movies, that you find also in the Trumpist ideology and the rhetoric about the deep state.
But, you know, that's the picture that you get in those films.
In this film, it's totally the, well, it's Rumsfeld's shit-happens model, isn't it?
It's just, these things just happen because you have rooms full of people who mean well and have their own ideology, and they just sort of bumble along and do the best they can, and shit happens.
It's the exact opposite.
It's so strange.
Well, and if you remember the term, the reality-based community, and that was, that was, that's a real thing that was said by an unnamed source who is almost certainly called Rove, you know, according to like a Washington Post reporter and who was asking him, well, yeah, but what about like the reality of what's on the ground here in Iraq or in, or in our schools or but what about like the reality of what's on the ground here in Iraq And, you know, Rove is basically says, he says to this reporter, it's like, look, you live in the reality-based community.
We live in the faith-based community.
We make our own reality.
We change things on the ground faster than you can keep up.
That's essentially what he's arguing.
And again, that's a much more sinister story.
It's a much better story, a much more accurate story, is that we know exactly what we...
We're not planning it 20 chess moves ahead, but we're responding, and we're going to clean your clock because it just doesn't matter what the facts are anymore.
And again, that points directly to Donald Trump's now second victory in the White House.
To say that this movie is a war crime or whatever, to say that this is a criminally bad movie would be to overstate it.
It's so cardboard that it's just hard to...
I mean, it's so bland cardboard.
It's so bland that it's hard to...
Get that angry at it, but I'm continually amazed at just the missed opportunities.
There are so many better ways to do this.
That's it.
That's it, yeah.
It's just, and again, to have Oliver Stone, to have this cast, to have, I mean, I think down the line, the performances are very, very good.
I think, I really love Thandie Newton.
I don't love her in this.
I think that the, she goes too far with the accent, and it's just, it's distracting.
Is she Condoleezza Rice?
She's Condoleezza Rice, yes.
Well, I wanted to ask you about that, because that is such a strange portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, because she's portrayed, basically, as this brainless, almost bimbo-ish sycophant that just follows Bush around and agrees with everything he says, and...
Very, very, that is the most, you said it's like an SNL sketch and it is.
That to me is the most SNL type thing in it, that performance.
Yeah, that one and the other one is Rob Corddry as Ari Fleischer.
That's the one I always think of when I think about, you know, because, you know, Rob Corddry was on The Daily Show at this time.
I mean, he was a known, you know, he was a known guy.
doing doing stand-up and doing like comedy bits about this and then to just outright cast him as eric fleischer that's just it feels very 2006 snl to me and in that in that way but well i think my my overall favorite performance in the film might be scott glenn as rumsfeld because he plays him as this sort of weird off in his own universe verbose alien sort of peering through these glasses at everybody else and interject
And you keep on getting this bit where he tries to interject to help the situation, and he comes out with stuff that's, you know, he just comes out with syllables, and everybody else in the room is like, what's he saying?
No, no.
Yeah.
I mean, that's probably very accurate to Rumsfeld.
He's just like, that is a man who's just pure hostility.
The only thing he knows is, you know, bomb him.
That's it.
Rumsfeld.
Man, we should do that Errol Morris documentary, The Known Unknowns, I think it's called, where he actually interviews Rumsfeld.
It's not Errol Morris' greatest film, but it's interesting.
Yeah, I really like that one.
I mean, again, I don't think she's doing much for the movie.
I love Elizabeth Banks.
I love Josh Broderland.
Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush gives a very convincing version of the actual absolute monster that Barbara Bush was in real life.
There's a real accuracy there.
Again, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, not just the Cheney speech, but all of the Cheney speeches.
I mean, he's a very believable Dick Cheney.
He disappears into that role.
Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, all the way down the list.
I mean, Bruce McGill is Tenet.
I said that Tenet is treated well, but I really love Bruce McGill.
And I mean, I think he's, I mean, again, all of the components are here.
Everything was here to make a really good version of this movie.
And it's just, it's failed by the script and it's failed by the basic concept of what we're trying to do.
It's just, it's so limp, it's so nothing.
It's just hard to, it's hard to...
Yeah, I just end up, I just end up back where I started.
I just end up baffled about what I'm watching.
You know, why was this made?
What was anybody thinking?
It's kind of a baffling film, to be honest.
I don't get it.
I do not get it.
Yeah, sorry, I was just looking at the cast list.
Apparently, Jeb Bush is in this film.
There's an actor who's marked as playing Jeb Bush.
I don't remember him.
It might have been when he was a kid or something.
He made about as much impression as Jeb Bush does in person.
Right.
He might have been in one of the crowd scenes at the inauguration or something.
It's entirely possible.
Yeah, not a great film.
We're not fans.
It's no dick, that's for sure.
It's no dick, that's for sure.
I kind of like to end on this.
I think we've already answered this, but what do we think the film is saying about the American presidency?
I think it's saying that it's this position where your personal neuroses, or just the kind of person you are, takes on historical significance.
If you are fundamentally kind of a C student goof-off who doesn't really understand things, and you fall bass-ackwards into that chair, then those traits will affect the world.
And...
In this instance, they affected the world just from that basic personality, just from being who he was.
He affected the world in this vast way without himself actually being a particularly significant or impressive person.
Not being evil, being even well-meaning.
I think if it's saying anything about the presidency in general, it's just saying that Just that position of power will magnify the importance of your traits in ways that you can't predict.
If I had to try to put a coherence onto it, that's my best attempt.
Yeah, it treats it as very much like the person in the office is more important than the apparatus around it.
Which, as I say, is the exact opposite of the thesis you get in Nixon.
In Nixon, the thesis is that there's this gigantic, unseen, occult system that's chugging along and pushing everybody in the directions that it wants, almost like this gigantic vampire.
This film, the exact opposite.
The system is essentially empty and neutral, and it's just sitting there like a tool, waiting to be picked up, and it'll do whatever the person who happens to come along wants it to do.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Or in JFK, where the whole thesis statement of the film is that Kennedy was such a bright, shining light on the hill.
He was such the king of Camelot.
He was going to change so much about this country that the powers that be had him killed because there was no other way to prevent him from achieving greatness.
It's just such a different vision of the presidency.
I agree.
Although I do agree that the nature of power is that it's going to magnify both your flaws and your greatness.
If I can have another attempt at it, I think that's probably what Stone is getting at, because he and George W. Bush are the same generation.
So he's talking about his generation, isn't he?
He's not really talking about politics or the presidency at all.
He's talking about what happened to his generation.
Yeah, they were born in the same year, actually.
Yeah.
They were both born in 1946. And that makes it all this, you know, the film doesn't mention Bush and his complex relationship with the military and the draft.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think the Air National Guard is mentioned once as one of the string of failures that Poppy puts on W early in the film.
But it's not referred to other than that, you know?
Yeah, I just looked it up.
George W. Bush was born about two months before Oliver Stone.
So they are almost exactly the same age.
And now, like, you know, projects like this film, which treat, like, W.S. as just this kind of decent-hearted guy with some flaws who found himself who just happened to start a couple of wars that created horrendous war crimes, you know, that leads directly to the, you know, The modern era of seeing W is just like, oh, he's just this old grandpa over there.
He paints his paintings, and he sits and has a Werther's original with Ellen DeGeneres.
Although, Ellen DeGeneres, since her star has certainly dropped quite a bit in the last few years as well.
Maybe those two actually do deserve each other, but he's just the adorable grandpa.
He's just the guy, you know?
I have said on this podcast that people get quite angry at me, and I might have to eat my words given the next four years, but I still hold that George W. Bush was the worst president of my lifetime.
Granted, he got two terms, and Trump is now getting his second term.
So I may eat my words on that, but I still hold that George W. Bush was the worst president of my lifetime.
And...
Well, and even if Trump does, you know, Trump, Bush Jr., and get to be the worst of your lifetime, he will have been able to do that, at least in part because of the damage that was done to the American society and American politics by George W. Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rove and all these people.
If he ends up being worse, and I think it's debatable, but if he ends up being worse than Bush when it's all totted up, then that's kind of on Bush anyway.
And Reagan and Nixon before that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Reagan probably more than anybody.
Yeah, I know.
Reagan kind of started a lot of this stuff, and the only reason I don't think he's the absolute worst is because W was just that bad.
Just in terms of body count.
Just in terms of body count, it's hard to compete with George W. Bush.
That is staggering.
And just that they just did not give a single solitary fuck about it.
It's just, oh my god.
The thing is, re-watching this film, I was like, right.
The election that 2024 feels most like is the 2004 election, where it felt like John Kerry's going to do it.
John Kerry's going to get in there.
We've got all these terrible, terrible things that Bush has done, and we're just going to run against that.
And then crushing defeat at the balance.
You know, 2024 definitely feels that Harris is going to be, you know, they have so much energy, and Tim Walls is such a nice guy, and he's going to come in there.
They're just going to steamroll over, and then, like, rushing defeat.
Yeah.
Kerry, you know, Kerry's a fucking Vietnam war hero.
He's in a PT cruiser.
They can't possibly, oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Remember the swift boaters for truth?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I was referring to.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, no.
And it's such like that same, you know, they wear the little fake bruises, right?
The little fake purple hearts, you know, they wear it on there.
It's like to mock Kerry's military service.
And what did they do to some walls?
Is there He lied about his military service, and they bring out people who served with him.
It's like, oh, we never liked that guy, and all that sort of thing.
And they bring out the garbage truck thing.
It's like, they called us garbage, so we're going to ride around in garbage.
The idea that it's all just a meme, that's just such a part, and again, absent from the film, completely absent from this film.
We can't keep going.
We've been going over an hour and a half.
We've got to eventually stop.
I'm getting angry about the Iraq war again.
It's 2024 and I'm getting angry about the fucking Iraq war again.
I tell you, I was so angry back then.
I was so angry all the time about that.
The day they actually started it, I was heartbroken.
I didn't know what to do with myself.
I think we've actually talked about our responses to the...
So here's what I was actually...
I'm going to do this on mic.
You can cut this if you want.
I was re-watching this, tickled, to think that we could now do one more of these.
If you want to do more George W. Bush content...
I think a better, but equally flawed, a better, but flawed movie.
It is significantly better than this one, but an interestingly flawed in some of the same ways is the Adam McKay 2018 Vice, which sort of tells the same story, but from Dick Cheney's perspective.
Uh-huh.
With Christian Bale as Chaney.
I was going to suggest we do that one at some point.
We don't have to do it next, but if you want to do more W Bush content, that would be the perfect continuation because it's so much more interesting in what it's doing because it's Adam McKay, and Adam McKay is just a more interesting filmmaker in 2018 than Oliver Stone was in 2008, but makes a lot of the same mistakes.
But I don't know.
How do you think?
I think that's a really good idea because that is another...
I mean, I studiously avoided that film and have continued to studiously avoid it in exactly the same way that I avoided this one.
So yeah, let's do it.
Again, this is one that I saw theatrically solely on Adam McKay, the guy who made the big short.
I dearly love that film.
It has its flaws, but it is so good at what it's doing.
The idea of that guy going and really sticking it to Dick Cheney, that tickled me to no end.
I was there opening night for this one, and it was very disappointing.
I mean, there's a lot of great stuff in it, but it's just you can't...
And then Don't Look Up is another one, Adam McKay's third feature, and it's still like...
It's just you can't capture that same lightning in a bottle that you got in a...
The Big Short, you can't do that three times.
It's just, you gotta do something else at this point.
So we'll do that one next.
We'll do Vice next.
Maybe soon.
Maybe soon.
But I'm not watching Don't Look Up.
I will never watch that film.
Okay, yeah, no, no.
That one is so, I mean, oh, God.
Nor, by the way, will I ever watch Civil War.
So those are just, they're off limits.
Not doing it.
I think we might be able to do this here in a couple of weeks.
I think we can schedule a time and just plow through these and just do more bonus content because it is cathartic, particularly with the upcoming impending Trump 2 presidency.
It is kind of cathartic to talk through some of these issues, and I know we missed some months going back, so I think we should definitely put out some more content.
Maybe we'll do that in a couple of weeks.
I think that would be fun.
Sounds good.
Okay, well, thanks for listening, everybody.
That was us talking about 2008's W, directed by Oliver Stone.
And we apparently will be back with another bonus in our President series on Adam McKay's voice, hopefully quite soon.
In the meantime, just watch this space and we will be back with more on-point material as well in the not-too-distant future.
I've got some mainline episodes and kind of cooking upstairs, and hopefully in the next week or two we can get another one of those out too.
It all just depends on kind of my personal schedule and what's going on in my personal life, but I think I'm going to manage that.
So, yeah.
There you go.
So, look out for that, listeners, and thank you as ever for listening, and we'll see you back here quite soon.
In the meantime, look after yourselves.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye, Daniel.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
By 2016, nearly 6,900 U.S. soldiers had lost their lives in the war zones.
Roughly half of these deaths were caused by hostile fire and improvised explosive devices, along with vehicle crashes, electrocutions, and heat stroke deaths.
In addition to US soldiers, many US contractors have died in action as well.
The contracting companies, however, have failed to report many of these deaths.
A conservative estimate is that at least 7,000 of these workers have been killed in both wars.
In addition, for every U.S. soldier killed, six Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi security personnel have died as well.
In other words, more than 50,000 allied Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi soldiers and police have died in combat.
The figures available for opposition fighters are controversial because allied forces have often been motivated to count killed civilians as militants.
One estimate, however, puts the total number of fighters killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq at 110,000.
The largest number in the death toll, however, is not soldiers, but civilians.
Living in these war zones, civilians have been killed in their homes, in markets, and on roadways.
They have been killed by US warplanes and soldiers, by the US allies, and by insurgents and sectarians in the civil wars spawned by the invasions.
The total of violent civilian deaths in the Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq wars are conservatively counted at 217,000.
Every single one of these deaths devastates a family and debilitates a community.
This total of over 390,000 dead soldiers and civilians, however, includes only those who have been counted as direct deaths, or deaths by bomb or bullet.
An additional large number of people have died in these wars by indirect means, as they have in all the wars of human history.
They have died due to hunger, disease, or injury that resulted from the war's disruptions and environmental harm.
It is difficult to estimate just how many people have died indirectly in these wars, but researchers suggest that in recent conflicts, for every one direct death, there are at least four other indirect deaths.
A conservative estimate is that these wars may have resulted in the indirect deaths of an additional 870,000 civilians.
