What goes 'round

Day before last, I happened into the room where my wife was watching "Charlie Rose". He was interviewing George Clooney. They were talking about his latest movie. I was captured by what he was saying, mostly because of his boldness by making a movie about the president.

Apparently, Clooney decided to use real clips of Bush. He justified this by saying, "if we had an actor playing him, they'd say we made him look too much like a buffoon, and he does a pretty good job of that himself." I found myself sinking into a chair, so totally enrapt had I become at Clooney's chutzpah.

"His drinking became an issue," Clooney went on to say.

Sure, many of us know Bush is a dry drunk from Dr. Justin Frank's book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, that describes Bush as an untreated alcoholic who's "cure" came through a rebirth of his faith in Jesus.

Clooney continued, saying something like Bush is out of his league and nothing hurts him more than himself whenever he speaks in front of cameras.

I turned to my wife in cosmic awe. "I can't believe Clooney's saying these things about the president!"

That's when she set me straight. Clooney wasn't talking about Bush. He hadn't made a movie about the president. He was talking about infamous Commie hunter, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the paranoid meglomaniac's last days in the new movie, "Good Night, and Good Luck."

"Oh," I said somewhat disappointedly. "That's what I get for walking into the middle of a program, I guess."

But as I got up to leave, I couldn't help reflect how history is repeating itself.