While waiting for our Chicken Nachos and while Jessica was out socializing with some of the other regulars the commercial for Tom Hanks’ movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” appeared on the TV. Needing something to keep my attention and being in a WiFi hotspot I pulled out my trusty iPhone and Googled Charlie Wison.
Asside: That may have been the single nerdiest statement ever made on this blog. Wait, here comes another.
When I landed on Charlie’s Wikipedia page (don’t say I didn’t warn you!) I did some quick reading and getting the bare minimum facts from the open-source encyclopedia I read of his playboy lifestyle and the various welfare state agenda items on his voting record.
Throughout the eighties, though, Congressman Charlie Wilson picked up a new cause: Afghanistan. With the Afghanis in a long war with the Russians, our cold war adversaries, Charlie Wilson on multiple occasions offered supplies, weapons and various military aid to the Afghanis in order to fight the cold war by proxy.
One thing that the article does not mention is who was leading the resistance against the Russians in those days. The Afghani leader’s name should be familiar to us all by now, Osamma Bin Ladin.
The most surprising thing about this is that Tom Hanks would get involved in another semi-controversial movie character so soon after the forgettable film rendition of The DaVinci Code. Of course to keep Hanks’ status as America’s favored son in Hollywood the part of Professor Langdon was rewritten to show him to be at least somewhat a person of faith.
Of course what sends my liberal-slant-spidey-sense tingling is the fact that activist and part time actress Julia Roberts is his co star in this film. Obviously Hanks is here to provide the film with some amount of acting credibility.
Much like the Wikipedia article the movie could be done glorifying the noble efforts of a liberal Texas Congressman turning from a playboy to a Cold Warrior without mentioning exactly WHO was receiving his aid.
Representative Wilson died in 1996 and thus never saw the extent to which his cause had gone awry. Still upon seeing this movie one should remember who it is “Good Time Charlie” was really helping back then.
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