Bushies on Parade: Good Look at a Sleazy Bunch

When Joe Wilson put his career, his family and his life on the line to defend America against the Bush Administration, our immediate thanks to him was to turn him over to Fox News like a sacrificial goat. Ultimately though, because of a combination of circumstances, forces and ultimate truth, Wilson and we won.

You can see how in the riveting "Fair Fame" playing at the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke. The movie version of this American tragedy stars Sean Penn as Joe Wilson and Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA spook (that would be "covert agent" in spy speak) and they are each superb and forcefully believeable. Penn plays Wilson, the smart, debonair international expert as a ballsy and brilliant man who knows how to play the game of get even up to a point and Watts nails Plane as the uber professional who only wanted to do her job.

You will remember that several officials high in the Bush Administration--which may or may not have included Dick Chaney and Karl Rove (they weren't indicted, though many believe they should have been) blew Valerie Wilson's cover in order to get even with Wilson for writing a letter that called George Bush a lair for some of the details about Iraq and nuclear weapons he presented as he prepared to takes us to war. Wilson had been sent to Africa by the CIA to determine if nuclear materials were being manufactured and shipped to Iraq. He found that wasn't the case. Bush, later, said it was the case, blatantly lying.

The Bushies are oily, sleezy and crooked as an antique camera bellows--which is just exactly how many of us see them in real life.

The movie is the intense and personal look at the Wilsons and how they fought the most powerful men in the world over a simple concept: truth. They had it. The Bushies didn't.

And this is a wonderful example of just why so many fear that wing of American politics.