That’s what I found in the very entertaining satire Thank You for Smoking, which I watched last night.

Bill Miller of the Seattle Weekly also picked up the aroma.

Naylor says, “I talk for a living,” but he also demonstrates the rationale behind his manicured rhetoric—who he’s serving, how he’s positioning himself, what’s his underlying agenda. (There’s a nice scene when he pays off a former Marlboro Man dying of emphysema, played by Sam Elliott; in order to assuage his guilt, since Naylor Jr. is watching, he coaches the old cowpoke on how exactly to stage an outraged press conference to disgrace the cigarette industry.)

He’s very much on point, though, when he explains what’s missing from Jason Reitman’s directorial debut:

Reitman isn’t yet Billy Wilder, but maybe Billy Wilder wasn’t yet Billy Wilder when directing his first movie either.He’s got a better idea of satire than how to execute it—you need to feel the sting outside the theater.

Indeed.

Still, [Reitman's] heart is blackened in the right place: We need more Naylor-esque rascals at the cinema these days, more misbehavior from high-functioning adults, not low-esteem teens.

Hear, hear.

(Great performance from Aaron Eckhart, too.)

Oliver Kamm, author of the excellent book Anti-Totalitarianism, which I wrote about here, writes the most cogent, if long, defense of the war in Iraq that I’ve read recently.

Okay: all I’ve read recently were long-winded criticisms of the war. And all I’ve heard recently (say, for the last year) are Goebbels-esque repetitions of the grim facts about the Iraq quagmire. But Kamm’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. It’s a very long response to, and differentiation from, Norm Geras’s nuanced post on his position on the Iraq war (which I wrote about—and found myself agreeing with—here).

Here’s Kamm’s penultimate paragraph, in which he sums up his defense:

The system of containment and inspections could not cope with a despot of Saddam Hussein’s turpitude and duplicity. If Saddam had remained in power, our knowledge of and influence over his regime would have been nugatory. The regime would in all probability have endured, first because of its unspeakable brutality – in the aftermath of the first Gulf War the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions were snuffed out with the loss of some 50,000 lives in the single month of March 1991 – and secondly because of the dynastic succession of Saddam’s monstrous sons. We cannot make a reliable judgement on the consequences of allowing a state like this to persist in its internal repression, external aggression and flouting of UN requirements. But there is one thing we can say with certainty. In the last few weeks we have gained an insight into the probable future military capabilities of North Korea and Iran. The fact that we no longer have to worry about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his family – not just now but maybe thirty years into the future – is a gain that may be greater than any of us can now conceive of. For that reason, among others, I insist that regime change in Iraq was right and immensely important.

It’s his final paragraph that really shook me, though, because it seems he is virtually alone among British public intellectuals in that he’s willing to defend the war on television:

In the last fortnight or so I have received quite a large number of invitations to appear on radio and television to argue the case for the Iraq War. I realise this is no reflection on my cogency; the programmes’ researchers state frankly that they have severe difficulty finding anyone willing to represent the pro-war view. I have appeared on some of these programmes debating, respectively, allegedly progressive and also High Tory opponents of the Government’s foreign policies. One thing on which my fellow interviewees and I, and everyone reading this, will be able to agree is that if the defence in the broadcast media of Tony Blair’s foreign policies is left to me, then Tony Blair is in trouble. I appeal to anyone reading this who may have influence in government circles to take this issue seriously. The case needs to be made. If we lose the argument at home, we shall fail to sustain our obligations in Iraq.

Unfortunately, I believe that the case was not made, that Blair and Bush tried—tried both to make the case and to change the game in the West’s favor—but failed. Why they failed will be argued for a long time. But fail they did.

And I fear that their having failed to make the case at home may cost us even more dearly than their having failed to change the game in our favor in Iraq. The bitter partisanship will continue, and we will all be distracted from the larger fight—the fight against the far enemy.