Iran crisis: A new case of wagging the dog?

THERE has always been a lot of intermingling between American popular culture and politics, and between Hollywood and Washington. Perhaps this explains why a former movie actor (Ronald Reagan) and a reality television show star (Donald Trump) were able to mount a successful run for the presidency, and why after retiring from office, many politicians end up having their own television and radio talk shows and writing bestsellers - or even, in the case of Barack Obama, getting to stream their own stuff on Netflix.

From that perspective, the lines between reality and fiction tend to get blurred when Hollywood decides to go to Washington and make films about its power players.

Case in point: The 1997 American political satire comedy, Wag the Dog, starred Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro as a Hollywood producer and a Washington spin doctor manufacturing a war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. The movie was released a month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal.