Episode 112: Wag the Dog

Wag the Dog is a 1997 dark comedy/political satire about a POTUS accused of sexual misconduct shortly before voting day. To bury the scandal, a fake war with Albania is invented. A White House aide (Anne Heche), political fixer (Robert DeNiro), and Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) work together to pull off a phony conflict to distract the American public.

And, of course, it works.

⚠️ Spoilers ahead.

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In this episode of con-sara-cy theories, host Sara Causey discusses the 1997 film "Wag the Dog," a dark comedy/political satire about a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer creating a fake war in Albania to distract from a President's sex scandal. The film, written by David Mamet and based on the 1993 novel "American Hero," is seen as a prescient commentary on political manipulation and media control. Causey draws parallels to real-life events, such as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and subsequent military actions, to argue that the film's portrayal of political diversion and media manipulation is more relevant today than ever. She emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and independent investigation over blindly accepting mainstream media narratives.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Wag the Dog, political satire, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barry Levinson, fake war, Albania, sex scandal, predictive programming, media manipulation, Hollywood producer, political diversion, narrative control, attention economics, social media.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will discuss the 1997 film wag the dog. It seems an appropriate time. Unfortunately, sadly, if you're not familiar with this movie, it's a dark comedy slash political satire with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman in the main roles. It was produced and directed by Barry Levinson, and the main characters are this spin doctor and a Hollywood producer, and they get tagged by the President to make up a fake war in Albania, because it's like the President is in trouble from a sex scandal. And the idea is people will quit paying attention to the sex scandal. If we have this war, there will be jingoism and patriotism, and people will be distracted by the war, and they won't be thinking about the sex scandal anymore. Wonder why I'd be covering this. Now. The screenplay was written by Hillary hinken and David Mamet, and it is taken from a 1993 novel American hero. I'm going to see if I can get my hands on that book, because that book is actually more so about Operation Desert Storm and poppy Bush. And I'm like, ooh, this could be, this could be the gift that keeps on giving. For tonight, we're going to focus on wag the dog and just contemplate, is this a page out of their playbook if some prominent politician like the president is embroiled in a sex scandal or some kind of lurid, tawdry, awful thing, you know, like, maybe, maybe, like the teffry tepstein files. Is it possible? Are they tipping their hand and showing us that if all else fails, it's time to hit the war button? Stay tuned.

Just a reminder, Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next non fiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now, back to the show.

Before I even get into analyzing the film itself, here's something that's interesting. I DVR this. I think sometime last year when wag the dog was on Turner Classic Movies. I didn't have time to watch it right then, but I was like, at some point this is going to be a podcast episode. I just know that it would be perfect for that. I didn't know how perfect, unfortunately, but here we are anyway, Ben Mankiewicz and Diane Lane are talking before the movie begins, and she is discussing how she saw the movie in 1997 and was really disheartened by it, because she was stunned by exactly how on the nose and correct that the film is, and she thought, I'm just not sure that I can take a movie that's so accurate as to how the American political system operates like a puppet being held by a puppet master. I'm like, Well, this is, yet again, an example of Hollywood telling you exactly what's going on. People will say that's just a conspiracy theory, or it's just a fictional movie, but I mean, you literally have an actor sitting there telling you, like, yes, the system is like a puppet being held on strings, and this movie is showing you one prime example of how it's done naturally. They also bring up Bill Clinton's sex scandals, and they're like, you know this. This happened before all of the news broke about what was going on with old Billy. And you know, I guess maybe that made us even more cynical about what was happening. Now, Mankiewicz, in his commentary here, makes it sound like wag the dog was released way before the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. But that's not actually true. Wag the Dog was released about a month before the news broke of what was going on between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and about eight months before the bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. And there were over comparisons at the time of like, here's this Hollywood movie showing you how it's done, and then here it is in reality, playing out. There was also a comparison of December 1998 when the Clinton administration initiated a bombing of Iraq. So there were at the time, there were. Discussions of Bill Clinton's impeachment because of the scandal with Monica Lewinsky. And so it's like, what do we do now? Bomb Iraq? The comparison came up again in 1999 when the Clinton administration intervened during the war in Kosovo and there was a bombing campaign against what was still then, Yugoslavia. Coincidentally, wink, Yugoslavia bordered Albania, and this impacted ethnic Albanians. That's very germane to the plot of wag the dog, because it involves Albania in the movie. And yet people will say there's no such thing as predictive programming. And I'm like, they literally tell you, they literally advertise it and rub it in your face what they're doing. It's not a coincidence. It's not like, oh my god, well, sometimes life just imitates art. And isn't that a coincidence? No, it isn't something else interesting that Mankiewicz says in this little introduction is he's like, Well, I grew up around politics. I'm a political junkie. I was raised in DC, and when I first saw the movie, I didn't like it because I thought the satire was too unrealistic. Ogre. Now he does say I didn't like it then, but all these years later, I do like it. I do get it. So I guess there's a moment of redemption there. But to have ever imagined that it was too unrealistic to be true, I think is, frankly, ridiculous. That's just my opinion. I could be wrong, but to say it was, you have one person saying it was so on the nose that it freaked me out, and you have this other person saying, Well, I was a DC Insider, and I just didn't believe it at all really. Come on. Now, I think I forgot to say earlier that obviously there will be spoilers in this episode for me to discuss the movie and why it's so pertinent to us. Right now, I'm going to have to spoil it if, for some reason you have not seen this movie, I highly recommend that you watch it first absorb it for yourself, and then come back to this episode later. We see a placard at the beginning of the film, essentially explaining the title. Because when you hear the title wag the dog, you don't automatically think, Oh, well, this is a political satire about a president that's trying to get rid of a sex scandal. But the the idea is that a dog wags its tail because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail was smarter than the dog, then the tail would wag the dog. So right there, just from that little rhyme and that little explanation, we're getting the general gist of things. And the phrase has come to be synonymous now with political diversion, like, Oh, something is going on on the home front, then we don't really want the citizens to be focused on So, hey, we'll, we'll point the finger at something that's going on with foreign policy. Look over there. Get distracted. Look at look at that. Look at what they're doing. From there we see a corny, but rather accurate, rather realistic for the mid 90s looking political ad of two jockeys talking, and they're like, well, never change horses midstream. And the idea is, keep going with the President, go ahead and re elect him for a second term, because he's a winner. And by the way, warfare makes that argument even more potent to the average American citizen, because you'll have people that say, Well, we're in the middle of a war. We can't change the commander in chief that that that would just be heresy, like we like it or not, we have to keep on with the same race horse and hope that we're eventually going to get to the finish line and that we're going to enjoy what we get once we arrive there, when we first see Robert De Niro's character Conrad Breen, who's like An insider, a fixer they Anne Hayes character Winifred Ames actually refers to Conrad Breen as Mr. Fix it. So when we see him getting out of a car and coming to the White House and being referred to as Mr. Fix it, if you look closely, there's a picture in the background that looks very, very, very much like some of the pictures that we saw of Bill Clinton and Monica winsky, because you see the President with his hand on the shoulder of a girl who's obviously much younger than he is, and he's got, like, he's got, like, his hand on her shoulder, and she's looking up at him smiling, like, Oh, I'm just so happy and excited by all of this. And so again, is that done by coincidence. Hell no. Conrad is taken down to a bunker type room with very few other people limited personnel are allowed to know what's going on in this conversation in this bunker room, and he's told he's expecting that at some point. Point in the past, the president hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny or a gardener, and it was never declared. Or maybe he made a pass at his secretary, and now she's going to come out to the public to try to ruin his image, but he's handed some documents. We don't yet know exactly what the accusation is, but we can read between the lines. There's a group called the fireflies, which sounds about like the scouts, or something like that. Teenage girls that came to visit the White House, one of them expressed an interest in a sculpture. He takes her to the office behind the Oval Office, and Haiti's character says they could have only been in there for three minutes, tops. Could we say that she had a bad reaction to flu medication? And Conrad is like, Oh, this is bad. This is really bad. They're able to steal a commercial from the President's opponent where he's using the Maurice Chevalier lyric. Thank Heaven for little girls. So he's pretty flagrantly saying that the incumbent is I'm trying to think of, if I can say, Let me think of a euphemism here, because I don't want to get, I don't want to get pulled off the air. Okay, I think I've got one that'll work. So the opponent is pretty clearly saying that the incumbent is a PDF file and is using, you know, this cheeky Maurice Chevalier song to do it. And Conrad is like, Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to figure out who's leaking information to the post, because the story about this girl is going to break the next day. And he's like, we got to figure out a way to stall that off. So he's like, somebody needs to leak information about the b3 bomber. We say it's not in Seattle at Boeing. And the people in the room are like, there is no b3 bomber. And he's like, that doesn't matter. And they're like, Well, eventually you're going to get caught. And he's like, that doesn't matter either. It only has to distract. It has to work as a distraction. It doesn't have to prove out true. Who gives a shit about that? So he's like, we have somebody leak this story that the President is staying in China, and we really hope that nothing derails the b3 bomber program, and then act like I probably shouldn't have said that.

Conrad tells Winifred, I've got to get out to LA to see a Hollywood producer. So the two of them fly out together and on the plane, we get some plot exposition, which is a technique that really any writer or screenwriter is going to use to make sure that the audience knows precisely what's going on. It's a conversation that might not occur in real life if this was happening, but for the benefit of the audience, we get some exposition. So she's like, tell me exactly what we're doing again. What? What is the point of all this? And he's like, you just need to relax, because it's nothing new. He says that during Reagan's administration, 240 Marines were killed in Beirut. 24 hours later, we invaded Granada, and that's the MO change the story, change the lead. It's not a new concept. Winifred tells him, we can't afford a war. And he's like, we're not going to have a war. We're just going to have the appearance of a war. So she responds, well, we can't afford even the appearance of a war. And he's like, yeah, we can. What will it cost? She says, but people will find out who? Who's going to find out? You talking about the public, the American public? Well, yeah, they could find out. And he's like, who's going to tell them? Look at what happened with the Gulf War. He's like, you just make a video of one bomb going down one chimney to blow up a building, and nothing else matters. The building could be fake. It could be made out of Legos. For all anybody in the public knows, but they've seen it on TV, and they believe that it's real. After they land at the airport, he's like, Albania, I think we should go to war with Albanian and Winifred, like, why? What did they ever do to us? And he's like, What do you even know about Albania or Albanians? And she's like, well, not much. He's like, exactly. So we just pick them. And now somebody from the press office needs to go into a press conference and say, We deny that there's been any Albanian activity. And she's like, but there hasn't been. And he's like, that doesn't matter. You just deny that it happened, and then it becomes the story, because people are going to assume you wouldn't be denying it unless something actually happened. The news breaks of the sex scandal. In fact, they are on a layover at O'Hare Airport, and the TV starts showing this story of this Firefly girl who is accusing the president of sexual misconduct. And of course, the public listening to this TV story are like, Oh, this bad. And De Niro's character, Conrad, is sitting in his seat watching their reaction, but he's calculating the whole time. And even as that's going on, Winifred is on her cell phone, which it does crack me up, because I had forgotten to some degree how 90s cell phones looked. And I'm like, Oh yeah, the early days of when people started to have cell phones a little bit more commonly anyway, just. Just the core memory unlocked there. So she's already on her cell phone calling people up, going, we need Albanian experts. We know we've got somebody call the Charlie India alpha, go, start, start. We've got them somewhere. There has to be and she's also on the phone with somebody going, there is no b3 bomber. We deny any involvement with the b3 bomber program. I don't know why you people are bringing it up. So even as the scandal is breaking and TV stations are picking it up, they're running their schemes. The opponent is like, well, if this is true, he should resign. So of course, the opponent is going to jump on it and try to keep it in the headlines. So Winifred and Conrad get out to Hollywood to meet with this producer, played by Dustin Hoffman named Stanley Motts, and the way that he's dressed like the way that he has his hair and his glasses, to me anyway, it looks pretty reminiscent of Robert Evans. So while they're still at Stanley's mansion, there's a press conference on and of course, Stanley's like, Oh, this guy's screwed. He's not going to be able to get out of this. He can't. He can't stay in China and hide forever on this diplomatic trip or whatever the hell he's doing. He's gonna have to come home at some point and face the music. And Conrad is like, we just have to get him through the election. He's he's up in the polls. If we can just get him through then it really doesn't matter so much what happens after he's reelected, especially in the second term. So they're sitting there watching this press conference, and one of the reporters in the audience is like, well, we have heard that there's a situation in Albania. The Press Secretary denies it, and he's like, Well, but just this morning, the State Department set up an Albanian Task Force, and we know it, so there's clearly something going on now, already we see the seeds of this distraction starting to pop up. Another reporter pipes up about a general who flew to Seattle, and she's like, is his visit connected to the b3 bomber? And of course, the press secretary is like, oh, but there is no b3 bomber. Another reporter stands up and says, Could this be related to Muslim fundamentalism and anti American hatred in the region? And Conrad is just smiling, kind of stroking his beard menacingly, like, yep, now they've connected the dots. Now they're getting it. Stanley looks at him a little bit awestruck. You can tell that he's intrigued and impressed. He's gone from thinking, Oh, this President is screwed. There's no point to thinking, Wait a minute, maybe there is a point. So he looks at Conrad, and he's like, how close are you to this thing? He pulls out his cell phone. Is like, what do you want the guy to say? Well, have him say something like, we're all concerned about the president and we're praying for him. So they say it through the cell phone, and within a matter of seconds, the guy at the lectern is like, the press secretary at the lectern is like, I know we're all concerned for the President, and he's in our prayers. Stanley is impressed, but he's like, Well, he just didn't go crazy with it. He didn't sell the line, so he's looking at it from the acting and the Hollywood perspective. So we have our spin doctor, we have our like, White House liaison, who's trying to keep all of this together, played by Anne Haish. We have Conrad the political fixer, played by Robert De Niro. And now we have Stanley, the Robert Evans esque Hollywood producer. That's like, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put the, put the pizzazz on, and I'm gonna make it more believable. We need to sell this. Stanley asks the million dollar question, what are you here for? What do you want me to do? He's like, this guy has obviously screwed a firefly girl. He's not coming back from that. There's, there's no way you'd have to have a war. And so Conrad looks at him like, Okay, now you're catching on. And he's like, What? What? What do you want me to do? And so they start talking about old fashioned war slogans. And he's like, we don't even remember the wars that these slogans belong to, but we remember the slogans. And Conrad reminds him, we remember the slogans, because that's show business, and that's why we're here dealing with you. Stanley asks the other obvious question, someone's gonna know, someone's gonna find out. How would we pull off a fake war without the American public ever finding out? And Conrad's like, Come on, be reasonable, who actually killed Kennedy? I read the first draft of the Warren report, and it actually said that Kennedy was murdered by a drunk driver. He tells him that the Gulf War video of a bomb going down a chimney was filmed in a studio in Falls Church, Virginia. And Stanley's like, is that true? And Conrad's like, How the fuck do we know? Do you get my point? And Stanley's like, yeah, I get it. They're standing in this office at at Stanley's mansion, and he's like, Okay, we got to start thinking about the storyline here. And Conrad is manipulating him by being like, well, you've never won an Oscar, and it's a damn shame, but you've produced the Oscars, and think of it. This way. We're not producing a war per se. We're producing a pageant. We need the visuals. We need the films like this is what you do best, and that's why we're coming to you. So he's like, All right, we gotta, we gotta figure out our story here. What do we have that Albania wants? What do they have that we want? There's got to be something. And so Conrad is like, well, maybe they just want freedom. They resent our way of life. And he's like, no, no, fuck freedom. It's got to be something more punchy than that. They want to destroy the godless Satan of the United States. So Stanley cooks up this plot that the Albanians have a suitcase bomb in Canada that they're going to try to smuggle into the United States because they want to kill the godless Westerners that live here. And the President is going to come out, and they're going to stage it so that it seems like the President is in China because he's gotten word of this suitcase bomb, and he's going to try to figure out a way to get a hold of this non existent b3 bomber to punish the Albanians for what they're trying to do to the United States. Conrad tells Stanley that he can have anything that he wants. And Stanley's like, trying to decide what that would be. Conrad says, Well, you could be an ambassador. And he's like, I do all this, and I just become an ambassador. And Conrad's like, Well, what do you want? He says, Oh, I would do it just for the hell of it. I do it just for the story. And Conrad's like, No, you can't ever tell this. Nobody can ever know that you did it. Like ever, ever, ever, ever, you can't talk about it. Stanley's going around making all his calls like one guy he wants to talk to is the fad King, and he's laughing and he's terribly impressed with himself. He keeps wanting to tell his story about Cecil B DeMille and an elephant. An elephant, but nobody's listening periodically, Conrad will fake laugh at his jokes. It does feel incredibly Hollywood. So he's on the phone with this guy that he wants to record a song, and the songwriter, musician guy is like, well, what's going to be the deal? Like, do I get percentage points? Do I get money? And Conrad's like, oh yeah, count on the money. Winifred's like, well, where's this money going to come from? And he's like, I don't know. Remember the yellow ribbons? She said, Well, that happened organically. And he looks at her, like, come on now, really, that was a put up job. Yeah, it was a put up job.

A collection of Willie Nelson Andrea Martin and Dennis Leary show up at the mansion, and they're all brainstorming different things. Ribbons are played out. AIDS has a ribbon. We've already done yellow ribbons we need to have like a dark green arm band, and it to show solidarity. And Willie Nelson is there trying to come up with a country music, jingoistic song about our neighbors to the north, we protect you. And so Stanley's like, Hey, you put me in a room with talent and woo. It just all comes together. Stanley decides that they need to make a grainy video that looks like it's newsreel of a young girl. She's in rubble. She's holding a kitten, and she's running from some war torn village in Albania, and they're literally sitting around the table looking at head shots, trying to decide which actress they should cast as this young woman who's supposedly a refugee trying to run from this war torn Village. I want to pause for a second here and look at the different spokes that are coming out of this hub, because that's what it reminds me of. It reminds me of a bicycle tire where you're looking at the spokes that come out of the hub and go on to the wheel. Obviously, we have the people from Washington, DC. Ann Hayes is the White House aide, and Robert De Niro as the Washington, DC political insider, fixer guy. Then we have Hollywood as another spoke, and we have Dustin Hoffman playing this Robert Evans esque Hollywood producer. I've talked before on this podcast about Lookout Mountain and how back in the day in Hollywood, there was the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station. It's now a private home that's owned by Jared Leto, which, that's a whole other can of worms. He seems like an odd dude, but there was a clear relationship between the military industrial, slash military intelligence complex, and Hollywood and a number of actors and actresses that made productions for them. And this is all documented, and it's well known. It's not just a conspiracy theory. This is well known information. So it's like even going back to the days of the Cold War, there was an obvious connection between Hollywood and Washington, DC. But then we start to see these other individuals come into the movie producer's house. You have Dennis Leary playing this guy, the fad King, who apparently has a background in like advertising or marketing. And we have Willie Nelson playing a musician who's coming in to write, like a theme song of this fake war. So it's like you, you not only have the reporters and people who think maybe on some level. People that they're doing sincere, real journalism. But you also have the entertainment complex, musicians that have been co opted, and advertising executives that have been co opted, and actors and actresses who have been co opted, I personally feel that they're absolutely telling you like almost a neon flashing sign on the top of it, like, here's how it all really works. Meanwhile, political ads are still running on TV for the incumbent president about, you don't change horses midstream. Dustin Hoffman's character Stanley sees one of them pop up, and he's like, why are they still doing the same old horse shit like it. This is stupid. They could be doing so much better. So again, like he's even though he's making a critique of the ad, which is totally a cliche and absolutely looks like a political ad that would have run on television for real back in the 90s, he's still participating in the system in his own way, Winifred starts checking the morning papers the next day, and the story about the Firefly girl is buried in like one periodical on page 12. Meanwhile, the front page news and all the major newspapers is war, Albania, war, war, war, war, war. So it's working something else that is both hilarious but super telling. So we pan back to Stanley, along with Dennis Leary and Andrea Martin, and they're sitting in there after having seen this, you don't change horses midstream political ad. And Stanley looks over at the fad King, who's played by Dennis Leary, and he's like, Would you vote for him based on that ad? And he's like, No, I don't vote. He's like, you don't vote for the president. No, I don't vote. The last time I voted was in a baseball contest, and I lost. So it just left a sour taste in my mouth, and I realized that voting is futile. So he asks Stanley, played by Dustin Hoffman. He's like, do you vote? And he's like, Oh no, no, hell no, I don't vote. I mean, I vote for the Academy Awards, but I'm never selected. So they look over at Andrea Martin, and they ask her, and she's like, No, I don't go to vote. It's too claustrophobic. I don't like the rooms. I couldn't stand at a voting booth and vote. It's just it's too claustrophobic for me. Now, that's a funny moment, and it's the kind of moment that, if you're not paying close attention, it could just get thrown away in your mind. But again, they're telling you something really important. If voting actually changed anything, we wouldn't be allowed to do it. The people that are in these positions of power, they're not even voting. They're like, Oh no, it's a waste of time. I mean, Dennis Leary's character, flat out, says it's futile.

So the fad King is trying to

pitch the idea of going to war with Italy instead. So he's trying to convince Conrad, for advertising purposes, it would be a lot better if the US had a thing with Italy, like, give them the boot. Wouldn't that be an awesome slogan, and we could do shoe designs around the war. It'd be so much easier for me to get something going if we chose Italy. Why are we locked in on Albania? And Conrad is like, well, because in about half an hour, the President is going to declare, or is going is going to war. That's what he said, is going to war with Albania. And the ad the fad King is like, really, we're declaring war. And he's like, No, we're not going to declare war. Congress hasn't declared war since, like, World War Two. You just always say going to war. So again, we're getting another page out of the playbook. You don't officially declare war. You don't have the way that it's supposed to constitutionally work with Congress being involved. You just side stepped out and say we're going to war, not that we've officially declared war, wink, but that we're going to war. Another one is we're at war. They go to a set to film the scene where the fake Albanian girl holding a kitten is going to be fleeing in rubble, and the actress is Kirsten Dunst. And she's like, Oh, I just can't wait to be able to put this on my resume. And of course, Conrad is like, yeah, we need to talk about that step over here. You know, she's getting strong armed. And then Winifred gives her a piece of paper on a clipboard, and is like, here, you need to sign this. Well, I can't sign anything without my agent. He'll get really mad at me. Oh, this doesn't have anything to do with your deal or your payout. This is a temporary security clearance. She goes back to Conrad, and she's like, okay, all jokes aside after this goes national, like, I could put it on a resume, right? And he's like, No, you can't. You can't ever tell anybody that you were involved with this. Well, why not? What? What's the worst that could happen to me if I ever did? And he was like, people will show up at your house and they'll kill you. Essentially, everything that needs to be done for this fake Albanian refugee girl fleeing a war torn area holding a kitten is done using a green screen. Kirsten Dunst is holding a bag of potato chips and running across really. Nothingness on a green screen, and everything else is just keyed in by computers. And so Winifred is like, well, how soon will this be ready? And the crew is like, oh, probably four or five hours. Oh, great. We can leak it to the press tonight, which they do. And of course, it comes on the news like, Oh, this is a harrowing site of this poor refugee running away from awful things happening in her country so sad as Winifred and Conrad are in the back of a limousine planning a television scene where some Albanian girl is presenting a relic or an artifact of some kind to her elderly mother, and then the President is going to be involved giving her his coat. And they're on a rainy tarmac somewhere, like they're imagining different scenes that would look good to the public. Basically, they're pulled over and detained by the Charlie India alpha, and Conrad is able to talk his way out of it, like we're we are at war. The agent is arguing with him, No, we're not. He's like, Yeah, we are, and we're doing this for the best interest of the president. We're doing it for the best interest of the country. So butt out, they're able to pull off this scene with the young Albanian girl handing a sheaf of wheat to the President, and her mother or grandmother, whoever it is, gets all weepy, and it plays really well on television. And then Dustin Hoffman's movie producer character Stanley, and then Willie Nelson, playing the musician that's helping out in all of this, they coordinate a We Are the World type gathering of singers to make some rah rah song about fighting for our democracy. However, the Charlie India Alpha doesn't give up without a fight. They go to Senator Neal, the rival candidate, and then he goes on television, saying, the hostilities with Albania are over. I've been informed by the agency that troops are standing down. Everything is over with, there's nothing to worry about. So then the media shifts its focus back to the sex scandal. In their brainstorming, the group decides, Okay, if the war is over, that doesn't mean that we're completely sunk. Stanley's like we forgot something really important, the war hero, someone was left behind enemy lines, and now the country can rally around him. The fad King is like, I wish we could do something with a shoe. So they're talking about the idea of an old shoe left behind, like an old shoe. So he charges Willie Nelson's character with like, okay, scrap the We Are the World type song. Now we need something about a shoe. And so there's actually a scene where Willie Nelson and pop staples start riffing on this song of the good old shoe. The good old shoe, they find a military man named Schumacher and decide that he can be their prop fake war hero. They can drop him behind enemy lines and a sweater, and he's going to have to be the soldier that everybody goes back to get. Actually, I think his name was Schuman they threw out several names. It was like Schumann Schuster Schumacher, but I think they settled on Schumann. The record that has been recorded by Willie Nelson and pop staples, Conrad tells them, get this in the Library of Congress. Now folk music from 1930 so they have faked this old song so that it seems like it's always been in existence, but really it was recorded specifically for this incident. And I'm just going to say, if that sounds far fetched to you, if you're like, well, that's probably hyperbole. I doubt that anything like that, quote, unquote, in real life has ever happened. I wouldn't be so sure of it. Conrad and Stanley prepare a speech that they want the President to give. He drags his heels and says he doesn't want to do it because he thinks it's too corny. So Stanley says, Get me 30 secretaries and put them in the Oval Office. He goes in there pretending to be the president, like he's doing it in mock form, like, all right, Mr. President, watch me do it. So he sits at the desk in the Oval Office. He gives the speech. Points out, here's where I would talk a little louder, here's where I would talk a little softer. And by the end of it, all the women are crying. There's another line again, if you're not paying close attention. It almost seems like a throwaway, but Stanley's walking out like, Oh, I could have done this, a simple change of wardrobe. I could have wound up here, and it reminds me of John Henley song, dirty laundry, about journalism. Well, I could have been an actor, but I wound up here. I just have to look good. I don't have to be clear. This is also telling us something important about the level of acting, the level of playing a role, playing a trope that goes on in Washington, DC, the President goes through with the address, and we discover that Schumann, this soldier that's. Been left behind is played by Woody Harrelson, and he has supposedly left a message there are little rips and tears in the sweater that he's wearing. And in Morse code, it spells out courage mom. So it's like, oh, you know the public is going to eat this up. There's a White House staffer that's been pretty much prodded by Conrad to have pillow talk with one of her connections in the media, like, Wasn't there an old folk song called old shoe? I can vaguely remember it, but I think there was a song like that from way back in the past. The old shoe record magically gets found in the Library of Congress, and it starts getting radio airplay. Conrad and Stanley go around at the behest of the fad King, who's come up with this idea of taking old shoes and flinging them all over the place, putting them on trees, putting them on traffic lights, putting them on power poles, etc. Like we're going to keep on flinging old shoes until this soldier, Schumann comes back home from behind enemy lines. The fad King, meanwhile, is going crazy with all kinds of ideas like, Well, what did Schumann eat when he was behind enemy lines? I don't know, birds and snakes. No, he ate tiny cheeseburgers and little pouches. So that way we can get deals going with like Burger King and Johnny Rockets about the old shoe burger. You can have it behind enemy lines, or anytime they want to have a granite sculpture made of the Fallen Soldiers in Albania. He wants Dennis Rodman to dye his hair they show on TV a collection of students at a high school throwing in a spontaneous moment of patriotism, throwing all of their shoes onto the court to support this fake soldier who's fake behind enemy lines. This is also one of those moments that if you're not paying enough attention, it can slide right by you. But it also makes me wonder, like, how many kids are manipulated by crap that they see on TV, like they assume that whatever they're seeing on TV must be real. Nowadays it would be social media. They assume that whatever entertainer or singer or celebrity that they follow is telling them the truth, and they just jump on the bandwagon of a trend. Meanwhile, it's it's literally been engineered for them to do that, and they're playing right into the hands of it. And Stanley laughed, and he's like, oh, there's no business like this. Some of you may also remember that in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, in like 2013

people leaving running shoes behind, or wearing running shoes in various places, became like this symbol of we stand against what happened at the Boston Marathon bombing. I remember working in an office. I'm not going to say where, give any details, but I remember working in an office where we were encouraged to wear sneakers just long enough for a photo op on social media so that it could be like, hey, look, we stand in solidarity and we rebuke what happened at the Boston Marathon bombing. Now take those tennis shoes off and put your dress clothes back on. We also see Merle Haggard has recorded a song called Have courage, mom. People are in the audience crying. We can also start to see that Stanley is getting aggravated that nobody is ever going to know what great work that he's done. It's bothering him. And Conrad is like, well, you get the pleasure of the job well done, you'll be in great favor with the President. Like it's okay that the public doesn't know. They don't ever need to know. But you can tell that it's gnawing on Stanley. Stanley Winifred and Conrad get on a plane, and they go to pick up Woody harrelson's character, Shubin. And when he gets on the plane, they discover that he's manacled because he's a convict. They start looking through his file to figure out what he did, and at one point he essayed a nun, and Winifred is like, oh my god, oh my god. What have we done? Who have we picked? Apparently, when we said special programs, they thought we meant special prisons, and they gave us a convict who's done awful things, and in the file, it's like, he's pretty much fine as long as he gets his medicine. But if he's not medicated, all bets are off the plane starts to experience crazy turbulence, and Schumann is going off the rails, having a psychotic break. Anyway, the plane crashes, and it's like, what do we do now? Stanley is the only one who doesn't seem particularly bothered. No matter what happens, they're like, Oh, this is nothing. I remember when I was shooting this picture or that picture, and we had it way worse. They get picked up by a farmer, and they're like, riding around in this tractor. And Stanley's like, oh boy, one day when they tell this story, oh, it is just going to be crazy. And Conrad's like, No, you can't tell this story ever to anyone. And Stanley's laughing like, well. Yeah. I mean, I know, like, not me personally, but one of these days later in history when they tell the story, and Conrad's like, no, seriously, nobody ever can ever tell this story. If somebody ever tells the story, you will be killed. And he's like, Oh, I mean, I know, but so here we go. This is another area of the plot that eventually is going to boil over. We know, even just from this that the odds of Stanley making it are pretty low, because at some point he's going to Blab. Winnifred asks, well, what will we do when the public finds out that Schumann has been in a military prison, and Stanley's like, oh, that's simple. We just say that the records for everybody in his platoon were falsified because they go on secret missions, they have to have fake records. That's easy. As it turns out, the farmer who rescues them is an illegal immigrant who doesn't have his green card. And Stanley's like, what's the big deal? Why are you moping about that? Just call in a judge, make him not an illegal immigrant. Like this is an easy problem to solve. About that time, the press secretary comes on television to say that Schumann has been found he's back in the US, but he sustained some injuries. He will need to be hospitalized and medicated. Also, as this is going on and Stanley and Conrad are watching the press conference on TV, because they've gone into this like country general store in the middle of nowhere. So as they're watching this conference on TV, Schumann sees a woman and decides that he's going to go after her.

So as Schumann is trying to sa

the daughter of this gas station general store owner, the owner hears her screaming, and he gets his shotgun and pop, pops Schumann and Stanley. Oh, this is no big deal. What's more triumphant than the funeral of a military hero like we're not out of this yet. We're still totally fine. In fact, this might even be better. Schumann gets this big military funeral that is, of course, televised. There's even a dog involved. He's like, sadly, looking at the coffin. Conrad and Stanley are like, we've done a great job on this, and the great job is our reward. Stanley laments that there is no Academy Award for producing. And he's like, there should be, where would the movies come from if there wasn't somebody to produce them? You? So you can tell that it's still stuck in his craw a bit, that nobody's ever going to know this, quote, unquote, good work that he's done. It's also worth noting that, in reality, Schumann was a criminal who was plucked out of a military prison. He was also a ray pissed who winds up getting this big funeral televised send off, and everybody's supposed to think that he's a hero on television, the pundits are talking about how the Albanian conflict and the rescue of this soldier. It's really put the incumbent president over the top. He's running it like an 89% approval rating, and it seems that Conrad schemes have all worked. One of those political talking heads programs comes on the TV about like crossfire or the McNeil lair report from back in the day, and the pundits are like, well, it really seems that he's been pushed over the edge by his commercials. I think that his commercials just really resonated with the public. You don't change horses midstream. That that that has sunk in with the public. They get it. That completely grates on Stanley's nerves because he hates those commercials anyway. He thinks that they're stupid, and he's massively irritated that his work, his his campaign, his movie production, so to speak, has been attributed to these cheesy ass commercials that he absolutely hates. They flash up a one 800 number. And Stanley's like, I gotta call in or find somebody else to call in and set these people straight. And Conrad's like, you can't do that. Remember, you knew the deal when you signed on. You don't get to tell anybody about this ever. Let them attribute it to the idiotic ad campaigns if they want. That's actually to our benefit? Well, the truth is, it's to Conrad's benefit and the President's benefit and so forth. But it's grading on Stanley's nerves. Conrad's like, hey, we could give you an ambassadorship. You could you could be based in London or Paris. You could be having all kinds of sex, and you could get a bank account full of money. And Stanley's like, No, I don't care about any of that. I answer to a higher calling, which is the art. This is interesting on a couple of levels, because it's like, as a Hollywood producer who had a mega mansion, like, whenever Winifred and Conrad got out there, they're like, this is bigger than the White House. It's amazing the way that these people live in Hollywood. What does he want with a bank account full of money? What does he. Want with a bigger house or some estate in London or Paris, he could already have that. So he's he feels, in his own way, that he's answering to the art. I think the argument could be made that he's answering to his ego. He cannot stand that this movie project, as he sees it, somebody else is getting the credit for it, and is driving him bonkers. So their argument continues, and he's like, I never did this for money. I did it for credit. And Conrad's like, but you knew from the beginning that you would never get the credit. And he's like, Well, that's fine, but I'm not going to let two dickheads from film school take it. So he's he's really riled up, and Conrad's trying to calm him down. Winifred is just standing back looking at this. He starts griping about his last film, how it grossed all kinds of money and it had rave reviews, but oh, the New York Times just wanted to talk about the costumes. Nothing was ever said about the producer. Meanwhile, it never would have happened without the producer. Look at this fake military funeral. It's a total Sham, but it looks 100% real. I did that. I put all of this together. Stanley is just not going to be dissuaded from this, no matter what Conrad says. He's decided I'm going to take credit. He puts on his overcoat and walks out of this office they have where they've been overseeing this military funeral, and Conrad gestures to a guy looks like he might be a service agent. He says something into a microphone or like a little walkie of some kind. And you know, you know what's about to happen to Stanley. Meanwhile, the farmer who found them after the plane crash, is being officially made a US citizen by a judge in this private room. About that time, Stanley gets swarmed by other agents and is ushered into a car, we cut now to Hollywood, where we're told that Stanley has died of a massive heart attack. He was sunbathing poolside, and all of a sudden he had a dead right there, heart attack. And that's very sad, because he had made a lot of great films, and we'll all miss him. We see Conrad going into his mansion at the funeral, I guess, to pay his last respects. Who knows? Then we see a special report come on television that a T word group has claimed responsibility for a bombing in Albania. The President is quoted as saying that we'll be sending planes and troops back in to finish the job. And with this ending, we're left to contemplate the question, is there really a T word group in Albania doing this? Are they just latching on to this story and they're actually doing something, or is it continued fakery? Something that struck me is it's like you get so absorbed in all of the chicanery and insanity going on with Conrad and Winifred and Stanley that you forget, even just in watching the movie for a couple of hours, you forget what was happening at the beginning, which is the President has been accused of SA of an underage girl. So it's like, even in the course of the movie, you're so absorbed in how they're pulling off this fraud that you forget the reason why they're doing the fraud in the first place. That's almost like, you know, some next level 4d chess kind of shit, as I'm sure you can imagine. I wanted to make sure to review this movie when I did because of what's going on between the US, slash Israel and Iran. I don't know of anybody personally that's like, oh yeah, this needs to be happening. We could see this coming from 10 miles down the road, and it's necessary. You may have people that are big supporters of the orange man who will say, Yeah, we saw this coming. It's very important that we do this. But like wag the dog, you just keep having these so called conflicts and wars that were never really actually declared wars by the Congress. It's just all of a sudden we're having a war, or we're making a war, or we're experiencing a conflict, and the general citizenry is like, why we and in some ways, we're numb to it, because it just keeps happening. And it's like, what now? Really, really, now we've got to worry about petroleum products and natural gas, and gas at the gas pump going up, and, you know, you're going to get fucked there. Let's think about some other things besides just the obvious, like, well, I. The Orange Man and the teffry tepstein files. The news was really about all of that. And then suddenly, now it's like, but look over there Iran and the Ayatollah and they're the baddies. It's like, oh God, here we go again. Here we go again.

One theme that is also worth mentioning is this concept that narrative or story value beat out reality, the idea that people, the audience, the general public, are not experiencing reality directly, but rather they are experiencing a story that's told to them about so called reality. So you have this fake war with Albania that is festooned with staged footage, patriotic rah rah songs, emotional symbols and media repetition and as these different hokey, goofy things are fed to the media. They go along television and radio. Back then, the internet wasn't like what we have it now. You didn't have social media everywhere. So back then, television and radio were the still, the primary mediums. And once the story spreads through those primary mediums it be, it becomes, quote, unquote real to the public. At some point I do. I keep mentioning this book, but at some point I do need to go back and make an episode around simulacra and simulacrum, because that book really challenges this idea of what do we even label as real anyway, and the example that I keep coming back to is Disneyland versus Hollywood. Like, people go to Disneyland and they're like, Oh, I'm having this fake experience with talking characters and rides. But then when I leave after we leave the park, and we're going down the highway, like we're back to real life again, but it's like, what in Hollywood is actually real. So it's important for us to remember that He who controls the narrative very often controls public perception, even if the underlying facts are shaky, weird or flat out non existent. Another lesson to keep in mind is that media incentives favor drama and tabloid smut and craziness over actual truth. So if you will think about the role that the media plays in wag the dog, they don't ever go to like aggressively investigate the war story. Instead, they just amplify it. Why? Well, partly because of the relationship between the Charlie India alpha and mass media. Carl Bernstein talked about that in Rolling Stone like, oh yeah, hey, the agency uses the press all the time. It is what it is. And people just go, Oh, really. Okay, just like with the stuff that Snowden told us, you're being massively spied on, everybody's like, Oh, really. Okay, I'm not going to give up my life. I'm not going to give up my conveniences. So fuck it. So why? Why, other than this agency connection and people not wanting to get unalived by the agency, why don't they aggressively investigate the war story. Well, they also benefit from it too. It's dramatic. It's jingoistic. It's visually interesting, you know, like Kirsten Dunst running across a green screen, but by the time the public sees it, she's holding a kitten, which had been a bag of potato chips. She's holding a kitten and running for her life. It's visually compelling. It gets eyes on the screen, and it's easy to report. So this is something else that I want to point out, because nowadays we're so apt to say that attention is currency, and we ascribe that to social media and to YouTube, but we're forgetting that attention economics is not anything new. It was still happening in the days of the golden age of cinema, the movie screens and the TV screens and the radio. It wasn't about truth seeking. It was about attention economics and how a sensational story, an emotional hook, will travel a lot faster than some kind of nuanced correction or a quieter investigation. Another thing I want to point out is that symbols can very often be more powerful than policy. We can think of how they turned Schumann, who was a ray pissed and a criminal. They turned him into a war hero, and then after he got shot in the process of trying to essay a woman, they gave him a military funeral that was televised. They create this old shoe campaign for a fictional prisoner of war. I'm just long pausing because. It's like, Wow. You want to talk about Stolen Valor. This is just, this is insane. But these symbols, whether it's a ribbon, an arm band the old shoe and take your old sneakers and throw them up in the trees as a symbol of solidarity, the symbols compress complex issues and in some cases, outright fraud into something that's simple. It's comforting, it's emotionally satisfying. It gives people the sense that I've really done something. If I say I support old shoe and I throw a pair of old, worn out sneakers into the tree in the front lawn, I feel like I've really done something. I learned this lesson. I'm going to pull the curtain back a little bit for a second. I learned this lesson the hard way. After I released my first book, I started paying attention to things that that was going on, things that were going on, on social media, in my group of connections, and I started to really see people who are armchair quarterbacks and social media warriors. They'll post memes all day long about I hate the Orange Man, the orange orange MAN, bad. Orange Man, evil. Which? Look, I'm not saying that those things are not true. I'm saying that all they do is post fucking memes all day. Then you have people on the other side of the fence that Maga is great and the Orange Man has been maligned. He's trying to change things for the better. He's trying to get back to traditional values, and that's why they hate him. But that that's all. That's the extent of it. They just post shit over and over and over again on social media. Do they read books? No, they don't do they invest in anything other than what they can like or share on a screen? No, it takes basically no effort to share a fucking meme. It takes no effort to like or heart a post or to use an angry emoji. And so we see that same phenomenon with like, the old shoe campaign. Doesn't take any effort to take some old sneakers and throw them in a shoe and be like, our support old shoe. Wow, because you've really done something there. Huh? A slight digression, but worth it. Another point I want to make is this complex between entertainment slash infotainment and politics and how all of it's in a it's in a cauldron. It's like a stew where all of these ingredients go in and then they just congeal together. And politics becomes like a movie production. That's that's one important piece of the satire. Politics is like a movie production, even to the point where they bring in Stanley Motts, who looks an awful lot like Bob Evans, to to do the production of this thing. They're writing the script, they're casting the characters, they're creating the visuals. They're even producing a soundtrack. So then war becomes a media event. It becomes show business spectacle, another thing. Short attention spans help to drive that manipulation. If we think about the 1990s having a fast media cycle, holy shit, it's even faster now, because of social media, because of Tiktok, because of people thinking, I don't want to invest more than 60 seconds in something. I think AI and chat bots are contributing to that as well, because you can get an instantaneous answer. It's like, well, why should I go to a human or why should I read this article in its entirety? I can just TLDR it with a chat bot, that distraction and that shortness of an attention span, that refusal to look for nuance and attention to detail, all of that becomes powerful. Political and media tools just create a new controversy. The previous scandal evaporates. If you're focused on Iran or the there's some other news story going around about some woman who is accused of trying to pop, pop Rihanna. It's like, okay, if you're paying attention to all of that, then you're not thinking about tefree Epstein. You're not thinking about what was in the Teps teen files. Just create a new controversy, and the old stuff becomes old news. It gets buried. Power often operates behind the curtain, which certainly we know around here you have the strategists, the fixers, the media operators. It's like how Jim Garrison said, the presidency gets reduced to a figurehead. Yeah, of course, a lot of political influence will come from advisors, consultants, PR, specialists, intelligence, networks, media executives, etc. So the visible leadership, that which you are allowed to see up front is very, very often not the real engine.

Truth can be manufactured. It might be fragile, but. But truth can be manufactured, so when wag the dog, a fake war spreads successfully. It's unstable in the sense that it depends on this constant maintenance of the narrative. And Conrad and Winifred get worried because they see cracks in the foundation, and they're worried about the whole thing collapsing. But Stanley's not. He knows that there can always be a pivot. So while propaganda systems may require constant reinforcement, they ultimately just readjust the story like, Okay, we have our war hero. Oh, God, He's crazy. He's on antipsychotics. He's been in jail, and he likes to sa women. Okay, no problem. He's been pop popped. Not a big deal. We'll just give him a military funeral with honors, and then he becomes a fallen hero. So even though you had people like Mankiewicz saying, like, I just thought it was so absurd. No, it isn't. If we were to distill the concept down, we could say something along the lines of, if you control the story, then you control the reality that the public experiences, particularly if somebody does have a short attention span, or they're just a social media armchair warrior, like I don't want to investigate, I don't want to, heaven forbid, read a book. I don't want to try to get out of an echo chamber. I would rather just post the same memes over and over and over again. Whatever it is, I don't even give a shit. What side of the political spectrum it is, red, red, red, red, red, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. Donkey, donkey, donkey, Elephant, Elephant, Elephant, on and on it goes.

And I think, like I I like to reach for some kind of optimism whenever it's possible. And I think in this situation, that's probably the optimism that I would try to give to the listener. Is just, please don't resort to being an armchair warrior. Keep yourself informed. Get out of the normal circles. Listen to something different. Listen to something that maybe you disagree with. Challenge it a little bit, poke it a little bit. Figure out what's going on. Don't take mainstream media narratives at face value for the love of God, because it's like what may have seemed absurd to people in 1997 is much more believable to us now in 2026, sad but true, and it's important for us to understand why that is because we've had all of this crap thrown at us, and it happens even faster now because of Tiktok, social media, etc, don't go around taking anybody's word for it, whatever you can investigate on your own and really dig into the nuance. I'm not saying you need to become emotionally involved with every story that you hear, but if something is tripping your bullshit trigger, figure out why? Figure out why stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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