Daddy’s Bad Boy

by digby

It’s a classic American story: In the prime of his life, a man who parties too much and lives in the shadow of his esteemed father turns his life around. He gives up alcohol, embraces religion and finds a new purpose in life. But will his desire to impress his dad and purge his personal demons put the world in danger? Coming soon to a movie theater near you: controversial director Oliver Stone’s “W,” the life story of President George W. Bush, a warts-and-all portrayal. […]
The film’s script captures purported notorious moments in Bush’s life: Rumors that his father pulled strings to get him into Harvard Business School. His arrest during college for tearing down the goalposts at a football game. Almost getting into a fistfight with his father when he comes home drunk one night in the 1970s. His vow to quit drinking when he wakes up with a wicked hangover soon after his 40th birthday. It also covers plenty of his administration’s lowlights — from Bush’s reported obsession with invading Iraq, which Stone will portray as a desire to avenge Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt on Bush’s father and his frustration with the failed search for WMDs to his penchant for malapropisms and cheery optimism about the chances for civil war in Iraq. […]
Stone, who mined psychological motives in his previous presidential movies, from the conspiratorial “JFK” to the dark character study of “Nixon,” makes much of Bush’s competitive relationship with his father and how it fueled his desire to invade Iraq. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld purportedly confronts Bush in 2002 about his obsession with Saddam: “What’s the big deal about Saddam? Bin Laden’s the trained ape that wrought this hell on us,” Dubya’s response sounds like a line out of “The Godfather”: “You don’t go after the Bushes and get to talk about it. You got me?” After his born-again experience, Bush says that he doesn’t ask his dad for advice because “there’s a higher Father I appeal to.” When his father cries after losing to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush sticks it to his dad by telling him that he would have won if he’d ousted Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War. When Bush’s parents tell him to hold off running for governor of Texas until after younger brother Jeb Bush has a chance to wins Florida’s top spot, Barbara tells him that he can’t win because “you’re loud and you have a short fuse.” Stone also portrays the president as stubborn and aggressive when it came to prosecuting the war in Iraq. Before the invasion, he tells a shocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair about alternative plans such as baiting Saddam by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors and assassinating the Iraqi leader. When he hears about French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s desire to give weapons inspectors 30 more days to work in Iraq, Bush explodes: “Thirty days! I’d like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s–‘s throat!”

This is not an April Fool’s joke.

I don’t know about the freedom fries line, but I’ve heard all the rest. And say what you will about Stone (and Jane Hamsher has said plenty) he is one of the most cinematically gifted directors around, always creating an odd sense of “memory” about events you already know about. This should be quite interesting if only because we are all so familiar with this territoryand it’s so recent.

Ari Fleischer says the script is wrong because Bush didn’t cuss as president. Right, Mr towel slapper suddenly stopped using salty language when he became the most powerful man in the world. We know his VP swears like a sailor, on the floor of the senate, no less. And there is at least one report that I’ve never heard refuted: “Fuck Saddam, we’re takin’ him out,” which could be the tagline for the film.

They may move move up the release date to before the election. Let’s hope he includes the scene of John McCain on his knees in the oval office, kissing Bush’s ring, begging for forgiveness and promising to do everything he could to ensure his reelection in 2004. I can see Bush, sitting on the edge of the desk, looking down on the supplicant, saying, “will you even promise to help the Senate pass legislation enabling your president to torture at will, in much the same way you were tortured in North Vietnam while I was snorting lines in Alabama?”

McCain replies, “Yes Mr President, I promise.”

This is an Oliver Stone movie.

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