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On the eve of his departure from the White House, President George W. Bush delivered a scathing attack on some of his harshest critics including actors Tim Robbins, John Cusack, and singer Barbra Streisand.
Speaking in terms usually reserved for the perpetrators of terrorist acts, Bush, who had requested an unprecedented 45 minutes of network airtime, went through a detailed review of the accomplishments of Robbins, Cusack, Streisand, and others since 2000.
Saying that “the record must speak for itself,” the president showed clips from several films including Robbins “Antitrust” and “Zathura,” Cusack’s “Serendipity” and “Must Love Dogs” and Streisand’s nails-on-a-chalkboard performance in “Meet the Fockers.” Bush described these films as “despicable” and “an affront to decent people everywhere, regardless of their political persuasion.”
To emphasize the point, he then read from negative reviews of the actors’ work from critics he said were “Democrats, every one of them.”
Repeating the famous quote of Edmund Burke that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Bush said that now that he was “no longer constrained by the traditions of his office” which “bar a serving president from responding to personal attacks,” the time had come to speak out against “these evildoers.”
“I have often said that I will await the verdict of history on my term in office. But I am certain that history would judge me very harshly indeed if I did not alert the American people to the threat posed by performers who speak with undiminished authority to a vulnerable portion of the public despite having not made a decent movie in more than a decade,” he said.
After acknowledging that some of his Hollywood opponents had, in the past, done occasional good work (he cited Cusack’s 2000 film “High Fidelity” as an “underrated charmer”), the president suggested that fading movie stars sometimes attack him “in order to further their own careers and remain in the public eye just it is turning its gaze to younger stars like Shia Leboeuf and Katherine Heigl.”
Of Streisand, who has come to personify Hollywood’s liberal establishment, Bush simply shook his head and chuckled, then held up both hands facing outward and said, “I’m a gentleman” several times, as though restraining himself from saying something deeply insulting.
Robbins, though, was not afforded similarly gentle treatment. The actor’s penchant for satirical one man shows was, in turn, satirized by Bush who performed what he said was a brief excerpt from an upcoming Robbins show, “Colonel Bloodmoney’s Bad Day.” Wearing a soldier’s helmet with a dollar sign on it, Bush gave a profane pep talk to an unseen platoon of raw recruits during which he encouraged them to kill any Iraqis who weren’t consuming enough American products.
“And that’s the sort of sophisticated political engagement you can expect from Tim Robbins and his kind, “ Bush said, taking off the helmet, as several aides applauded off-camera.
The soon-to-be-former president concluded his remarks with a ringing call to action, asking Americans “regardless of their party or faction” and “people of goodwill across the globe” to be “ever vigilant to the very real possibility” that since these actors have made so many bad films in the past eight years, “it is very likely that any new movies of theirs will be lousy, as well.”
