The new movie Dope is pretty funny. It’s about three non-gang-member, self-confessedly geeky black high-school kids who accidentally gain possession of a large drug cache and have to figure out a way to sell it so they can reimburse the drug dealers and stay out of trouble. (Parental advisory: The movie has a lot of sexual material and four-letter words, so it might not be right for everyone.) It’s set in the tough L.A. neighborhood of Inglewood and paints a convincing picture of the pressures on kids in that environment. (A colleague at NR who knows L.A. much better than I do has warned me to be careful, because in L.A., dangerous ghetto neighborhoods often don’t look like an East Coast guy’s idea of what a dangerous neighborhood looks like. I can now testify to the truth of this: I’ve been to and through Inglewood a few times now and it doesn’t feel scary at all. Just about the only thing I noticed that gave me pause in this regard was that a Jack in the Box I visited there had the workers behind one of those Plexiglass partitions you see in stores in sketchy neighborhoods.)

One of my favorite scenes in the movie was one I liked probably in spite of the filmmakers’ intentions. The kids are having a conversation with a white stoner/hipster/computer hacker who thinks it’s okay to say “n****r” because he has no racist intent. Two of the kids are willing to approve that, but one – a smart, funny lesbian – slaps him for saying it. The white guy and the two other kids say, Why did you do that? You were outvoted. To which she responds: Hell, I’m George W. Bush – I don’t care what the votes are!

Now, most people in the audience laughed because they thought the joke was “ha ha ha Bush stole an election.” And that was almost certainly what the filmmakers intended. But I liked the deeper logic of the scene: Here was a young woman who stood up for what she thought was morally right, even though a majority of her friends disagreed. I like that . . . and that’s what I liked so much about George W. Bush, too. Sure, I didn’t like all of Bush’s policies, but I sure did (and do) admire a lot of that gentleman’s character. I know that saying this means I’m not one of the cool kids – either among today’s liberals or among today’s conservatives. And you know what? Like the young lady in the movie and the former president . . . I don’t care.