Referring to the comments that come out of Hollywood about Iraq, John McCain once quipped that if "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded." Jonah Goldberg notes that the Deep Thinkers in Hollywood often have a tough time understanding Washington:

A common theme in Hollywood's treatment of politics is the notion that people with "bad" ideas are also bad people (to its credit, West Wing occasionally resisted this cliche, though usually to demonstrate that decent conservatives have the capacity to learn how wrong they are).

Of course, this view is shared by many people outside of Hollywood as well. The problem is that it just doesn't jibe much with reality.

As anyone who's spent time in D.C. can tell you, asininity, egotism, and rudeness are fairly evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. Some of the biggest jerks in Washington can be found spouting progressive nostrums about caring for the poor and the downtrodden. Similarly, some of the conservatives constantly invoking the Christian imperative to love one another can be found figuratively whacking their interns about the head with a hardcover edition of the New Testament for not properly trimming the crusts on their sandwiches.

The thing is, Hollywood already knew that about the religious conservatives. Showing "moral majority" types as closeted bigots, perverts, and hypocrites is a grand cinematic pastime. What seems unfathomable to many liberals in Hollywood is that many religious conservatives are in fact decent, pleasant people and that nastiness is almost an entirely independent variable from ideology. Man-of-the-people Michael Moore is a notoriously nasty boss, while "virtuecrat" Bill Bennett is famously fun to work for.

The refreshing thing about Thank You for Smoking is that the most likable character is the most "evil" — by liberal standards at least. Tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor, played by Aaron Eckhart, is a charming rogue who loves his son and doesn't apologize for his line of work. He never "sees the light" at the end of the movie, as Michael Douglas does in Falling Down when he realizes that, as an angry white male, he actually must be the villain. Rather, Naylor upholds a virtuous distinction Hollywood liberals consider sacrosanct when it comes to sex, but reject out of hand almost everywhere else: Something can be good — in this case, less smoking — without justifying government intrusions.

What's even more difficult for Hollywood to grasp is that government can't simply do whatever it chooses to do. Which is why, in Hollywood's Washington, speeches are usually a substitute for action. Douglas announces in The American President that we're "gonna get the guns" — i.e., all handguns in the United States — and that's supposed to settle the issue right there, hooray! In Dave, Kevin Kline announces he's simply going to give every American a job because having a job is just so darn nice and good. Never mind that government-guaranteed employment is neither a new nor a particularly good idea. You could look it up.

In reality, the reason so little gets done in Washington is not because "bad" people are stopping the good people. It's because different groups of people have different definitions of what's good and what's bad. And even when they finally agree on something, its effect may well be negligible, unforeseen, and slow to materialize. That's dull stuff for a movie, but not a bad way to run a country.