Life seldom imitates art exactly, but it comes close sometimes, as when Wag the Dog came out contemporaneously with Bill Clinton’s Lewinski escapade. It was hard to escape a similar irony involving the in-flight movie on my cross-country flight from San Francisco this morning, The Adjustment Bureau. If you’ve not seen it, the story features a handsome young congressman from Brooklyn whose political career is derailed when the New York Post (natch) publishes a photo of the congressman’s bare flip side, which the dashing young man had improvidently exposed at a college reunion. This is clearly a case of where Hollywood art falls short of the real world. I mean really, not even Breitbart would care about Weiner’s rear end exposed to Jon Stewart way back when.
The Adjustment Bureau in the film is the cadre of angels (I guess they’re angels — it’s purposely vague about this) who work behind the scenes to get our rising star’s fate (apparently to become president someday) back on track. Of course, the Adjustment Bureau is fanciful, almost as fanciful as the “House Ethics Committee,” which serves as the real life Adjustment Bureau for disgraced politicians like Barney Frank and Charles Rangel. But even the “House Ethics Committee” doesn’t have enough magic hats to save Weiner, even if Weiner were as suave as Matt Damon on the screen.