Here's a little exchange between Chris Matthews and Bush's spokesperson Tony Snow about the difference between movies and real world foreign policy. Matthews, evidently, is of the school who think politics and movies share the same mechanisms and can be seen through the same lense. Tony Snow is in the camp of people who believe movies that portray our government as operating in secrecy with no democratic accountability should be considered as fantasy so our government can operate secretly and with no democratic accountability.
"MATTHEWS: So he will seek congressional approval before any action against Iran?
"SNOW: You are talking about something we are not even discussing.
"MATTHEWS: Yeah, but you are, Tony, because look at this. 'I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region.' Isn't that about Iran?
"SNOW: It, it -- yeah, it is, in part, and what it is is it's saying, look, we are going to make sure that anybody who tries to take aggressive action -- but when Bill Clinton sent a carrier task force into the South China Sea after the North Koreans fired a missile over Japan, that was not as a prelude to war against North Korea. You know how it works.
"MATTHEWS: No, I'm just concerned because, very much in the years, in the months building up to this war in Iraq, we heard a kind of a drumbeat of the dangers from Iraq and the nuclear weaponry and what we're going to do about it, and then gradually we went to war....
"My concern is we're gonna see a ginning up situation whereby we fall in hot pursuit any effort by the Iranians to interfere with Iraq. We take a couple shots at them, they react, then we bomb the hell out of them and hit their nuclear installations without any without any action by Congress. That's the scenario I fear, an extra-constitutional war is what I'm worried about.
"SNOW: Well, you have been watching too many old movies --
"MATTHEWS: No, I've been watching the war in Iraq, is what I've been watching."
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