Given my overall admiration for Elizabeth Drew as a sensible and straightforward political commentator, I’m happy to have her account in The Huffington Post of what’s dishonorable about the historical distortions of the recent Frost/Nixon movie. Even though I enjoyed the latter as middlebrow entertainment in the Stanley Kramer mode, which goaded me into ordering and watching some of the original David Frost/Richard Nixon dialogues—generally finding Ron Howard as a director to be one of the abler purveyors of this kind of  dubious material, which I sometimes have a weakness for—it’s always useful to have someone like Drew pointing out the various misrepresentations.

Why, then, can’t I count on Drew to sidestep the grotesque Hollywood distortions about Nixon that automatically come with seeing him as “a tragic Shakespearean figure”—an absurd inflation that appears to have been invented by either Oliver Stone or his publicist (assuming that there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between the two) as part of the promotional campaign for his 1995 White Elephant Nixon starring Anthony Hopkins?

For me, there’s something unnerving about the way Nixon (the person) has been absurdly elevated and even validated in this cheesy fashion in order to sell a ridiculously overheated piece of merchandise, which Drew is all ready to buy into without blinking. How long do we have to wait now until Stone or someone else serves up a “Shakespearean” George W. Bush? (I haven’t yet seen W., which presumably doesn’t aim quite that high.) Isn’t this really a validation or at least a rationalization for the people who voted for these jerks?  [12/17/08]