Ebert's Review of "Bulworth"
"Wag The Dog"
Roger Ebert
****
So, why did we invade Grenada? A terrorist bomb killed all those Marines in Beirut, the White House was taking flak, and suddenly our Marines were landing on a Caribbean island few people had heard of, everybody was tying yellow ribbons 'round old oak trees, and Clint Eastwood was making the movie. The Grenadan invasion, I have read, produced more decorations than combatants. By the time it was over, Ronald Reagan's presidency had proven the republic could still flex its muscle--we could take out a Caribbean Marxist regime at will, Cuba notwithstanding.
"Obama's Benghazi And Reagan's Beirut"
"Future Generations Will Despise Ronald Reagan. Here's Why"
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of Ronald Reagan Posts
Barry Levinson's "Wag the Dog" cites Grenada as an example of how easy it is to whip up patriotic frenzy, and how dubious the motives sometimes are. The movie is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible; like "Dr. Strangelove," it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder. Just today, I read a Strangelovian article revealing that some of Russian's nuclear missiles, still aimed at the United States, have gone unattended because their guards were denied bonus rations of 4 pounds of sausage a month. It is getting harder and harder for satire to stay ahead of reality.
In the movie, a U.S. president is accused of luring an underage "Firefly Girl" into an anteroom of the Oval Office, and there presenting her with opportunities no Firefly Girl should anticipate from her commander in chief. A presidential election is weeks away, the opposition candidate starts using "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in his TV ads, and White House aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) leads a spin doctor named Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) into bunkers far beneath the White House for an emergency session.
Brean, a Mr. Fixit who has masterminded a lot of shady scenarios, has a motto: "To change the story, change the lead." To distract the press from the Firefly Girl scandal, he advises extending a presidential trip to Asia, while issuing official denials that the new B-3 bomber is being activated ahead of schedule. "But there is no B-3 bomber," he's told.
"Perfect! Deny it even exists!" Meanwhile, he cooks up a phony international crisis with Albania.
Why Albania? Nobody is sure where it is, nobody cares, and you can't get any news out of it. Nobody can even think of any Albanians except--maybe the Belushi brothers? To produce the graphic look and feel of the war, Brean flies to Hollywood and enlists the services of a producer named Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman), who is hard to convince. He wants proof that Brean has a direct line to the White House. He gets it. As they watch a live briefing by a presidential spokesman, Brean dictates into a cell phone and the spokesman repeats, word for word, what he hears on his earpiece. (I was reminded of the line in "Broadcast News": "Goes in here, comes out there.") Motss assembles the pieces for a media blitz. As spokesmen warn of Albanian terrorists skulking south from Canada with "suitcase bombs," Motss supervises the design of a logo for use on the news channels, hires Willie Nelson to write the song that will become the conflict's "spontaneous" anthem, and fakes news footage of a hapless Albanian girl (Kirsten Dunst) fleeing from rapists with her kitten. (Dunst is an American actress, and the kitten, before it is created with special effects, is a bag of Tostados.) But what about a martyr? Motss cooks up "good old Shoe," Sgt. William Schumann (Woody Harrelson), who is allegedly rescued from the hands of the Albanians to be flown back for a hero's welcome. Shoe inspires a shtick, too: Kids start lobbing their old gym shoes over power lines, and throwing them onto the court during basketball games, as a spontaneous display of patriotism.
It's creepy how this material is absurd and convincing at the same time. Levinson, working from a smart, talky script by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin, based on the book "American Hero" by Larry Beinhart, deconstructs the media blitz that accompanies any modern international crisis. Even when a conflict is real and necessary (the Gulf War, for example), the packaging of them is invariably shallow and unquestioning; like sportswriters, war correspondents abandon any pretense of objectivity and detachment, and cheerfully root for our side.
For Hoffman, this is the best performance in some time, inspired, it is said, by producer Robert Evans. (In power and influence, however, Motss seems more like Ray Stark.) Like a lot of Hollywood power brokers, Hoffman's Motss combines intelligence with insecurity and insincerity, and frets because he won't get "credit" for his secret manipulations.
De Niro's Brean, on the other hand, is a creature born to live in shadow, and De Niro plays him with the poker-faced plausibility of real spin doctors, who tell lies as a professional specialty. Their conversations are crafted by Mamet as a verbal ballet between two men who love the jargon of their crafts.
"Why does a dog wag its tail?" Brean asks at one point. "Because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail was smarter, it would wag the dog." In the Breanian universe, the tail is smarter, and we, dear readers, are invited to be the dogs.
Follow-up conversation with Frog Hospital's Fred Owens:
Dear Fred,
Thanks for your email.
When I write about politics, I try - when possible - to argue from my opponent's point of view.
Like you, I admire Reagan fleeing Beirut after Islamic terrorists bombed our Marine barracks there.
However, "right-wingers" are typically so blinded by light that the only way to penetrate their self-imposed benightedness is to get under their skin, making arguments based on their own dimwitted suppositions.
To wit.
American conservatives offer the ad nauseum allegation that Hillary and Obama did not support Uncle Sam's operatives in Benghazi, an alleged failure that resulted in four American deaths.
Just count them! Oh, The Horror!
But when 241 (yes, two hundred and forty one) of Reagan's marines get whacked -- one tenth the death toll of 9/11 -- and the oozy sonofabitch doesn't even issue a statement promising to "track down every responsible party to insure that justice be done," something is seriously askew.
What did "these-colors-don't-run-Ronnie" actually do?
He tucked his tail twixt his legs, and ran away only to devise a bogus distraction in Granada (!?!) to "busy giddy minds with foreign wars."
Under circumstances like these, I resolve to make right wingers rub their own noses in their own pile of shit.
What did "these-colors-don't-run-Ronnie" actually do?
He tucked his tail twixt his legs, and ran away only to devise a bogus distraction in Granada (!?!) to "busy giddy minds with foreign wars."
Under circumstances like these, I resolve to make right wingers rub their own noses in their own pile of shit.
"Obama's Benghazi And Reagan's Beirut"
Elsewhere...
To say that Ronnie presided over 8 years with "no war" ignores his Contra War along with his deadly support for "death squad authorities" in El Salvador and Guatemala and, as background to it all, his egregiously illegal Iran-Contra scheme which immersed his administration in cocaine dealing on behalf of every American citizen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
It is true that few Americans were killed during Reagan's administration.
But Dutch's determination to "take out" the democratically-elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua was a high water mark of one bad man's shadow government gutting American ideals.
But Dutch's determination to "take out" the democratically-elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua was a high water mark of one bad man's shadow government gutting American ideals.
"Future Generations Will Despise Ronald Reagan. Here's Why"
Pax tecum
Alan
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
I realized that Reagan preferred a Hollywood war in Grenada rather than a real war in Lebanon. He was a smart fellow.In retrospect, the one thing I admire about Reagan, and it might be the most important thing any President can do, is that he kept us out of war. Eight years. No war.When the Marine barracks were bombed in Lebanon 1983 with great loss of life, Reagan wisely got the hell out. Full scale retreat. No war. Substituting with a sham battle in Grenada -- with respect to the lives lost in that small conflict.
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