"A faulty and imperfect man as are we all, but a fellow who understood that Democracy was better than Communism, and that elites are not better-suited to accrue power simply by virtue of their elitism. Wilson was a plain, down-to-earth fellow; he knew that when he did wrong and got away with it - as when he was involved with a DUI hit-and-run in DC- he had genuinely 'got off easy' and admitted it. He knew that he had 'earned' no special consideration, simply because he worked for the people of his district.
Come to think of it, that may be what I liked best about Charlie Wilson. He understood that he worked for the people of his congressional district, and his country. Not the other way around.
One of the things that bothered me about the film, 'Charlie Wilson’s War' was that it portrayed Democrats as they used to be -as indisputably pro-American as anyone, and ideological only to the water’s edge - and only served to remind me how far away we have all come since his like filled the halls of congress.
I must wear the label 'conservative' only because 'classical liberalism' has been displaced by something that has appropriated the name, 'liberal,' and built upon its foundation something so narrow, closed-minded and thought-police-friendly as to disorient and daze the world.
As I wrote to some friends just now, 'if Democrats were still like Charlie Wilson, I would still be a Democrat.'"
--
The Anchoress
"If you like your war movies worthy, pious and starring Susan Sarandon as the teary-eyed mom of a 22-year-old boy sent to his death by the Bastard Bush, then you should probably avoid Charlie Wilson’s War.
There’s no simplistic antiwar message here, or even a simpleton antiwar message of the sort spouted by Sean Penn or Tim Robbins. Instead, this is a tightly-scripted, borderline slapstick comedy about America’s secretive arming of the Mujahideen during the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. And guess what? It reveals far more about contemporary America and what lies behind its interventionist zeal than all of those achingly guilt-ridden films about lions, lambs and dead American soldiers put together.
This is a war movie with a difference. Where the execrable Lions for Lambs
was largely a vehicle for Robert Redford and Tom Cruise to register their distaste for the war in Iraq, and Rendition
sacrificed pace, plot and good acting to tell the tale of an evil CIA woman (Meryl Streep, effectively resurrecting her bitchy role from The Devil Wears Prada
) and an innocent Egyptian terror suspect, Charlie Wilson’s War
remembers to include a storyline and character development. And because its overarching aim is not to advertise its stars’ and producers’ narcissistic antiwar credentials, but rather to give us a story, encounters, sex, politics, it manages to paint a truer picture of America’s relationship with the Middle East than the black-and-white, conspiracy-driven drivel offered by the likes of George Clooney (Syriana
) and Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11
).
If you like simplistic morality tales in which American administrations conquer the world in order to plunder its oil, and where the only redeemable characters are those brave Hollywood souls willing to make films about it, then go see the new Susan Sarandon vehicle,...Brendan O’Neill, writing in
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