By Michael Leon

OpEdNews.com

Shattered Glass is a movie dramatizing the fall of the 25-year-old writer Stephen Glass who was caught fabricating, plagiarizing and essentially making up dozens of stories while working as a staff writer for The New Republic.

Glass was fired and nationally humiliated in May 1998.

After watching Shattered Glass (Lions Gate Films) I was left feeling creeped out and disturbed by the Stephen Glass character played by Hayden Christensen in his excellent performance. I mean creeped out. I watched the film last week, and was a little puzzled by the film’s effect as I walked out the theater.

But it didn’t take long to figure out my reaction. Watching Shattered Glass’ Hayden Christensen on the big screen generates the exact reaction that I get when I watch President George W. Bush posture and perform on camera. It is the same unctuous, smarmy, not-really-sincere, but-on-one-level-he-really-believes-it persona displayed when President George W. Bush without batting an eye says, for instance: "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them. (May 30, 2003)"

There is something not just insulting, but weird about Bush and Glass, similar to when someone, for example, feigns an interest in your well being when you know this someone is stabbing you in the back when you’re not around. You feel like: “C’mon dude, just talk to me straight, o.k.?”

There is something pathetic about Bush surrounding himself with an enabling, pampering staff that collectively exacerbates this deluded and zealous man’s worst tendencies. Bush, like Glass in his writing, apparently feels absolutely no guilt or shame in proclaiming on policy after policy that white is black, polluted air equals “clear sk[ies],” and so on.

Bush, like Glass, when caught in a lie simply lies again, attacks whoever points out the lies (Joseph Wilson), or changes the subject. (True, Bush is just not smart enough to concoct his own lies by himself, but so what?) No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, no Iraqi connection to 9/11, so what does Bush do, he talks repeatedly about not 9/11, aggression and evil, and ignored the WMDs assertions like they never happened.

When watching The New Republic’s editor Chuck Lane confronting the Stephen Glass character, you also feel like grabbing Bush and screaming at the guy: “Stop it! Just knock it off, o.k.? Tell me the truth. Did you cook up this war? Just tell me.”

Bush and Glass seem simultaneously pathological and pathetic, infuriating and laughable—their utter disregard for the truth, their capacity to stare at a nation and lie time after time without apparent remorse.

In the end of Shattered Glass, an enterprising and honest journalist, the antithesis of Glass, Adam L. Penenberg of Forbes.com, did Glass in, shattering his career and exposing the fraud for who he is.

Apropos to the Bush admisntratition, the moral of the Stephen Glass story is that a liar can be exposed and held accountable. The colossus that is the Bush administration, built upon lies and acquiescence to lies, can be shattered into many fine pieces. All it takes is the will to confront and expose the liar and the liar will be held accountable and fall apart—an idealistic conception of power and truth perhaps, but an ideal supported by history time and again.

See Shattered Glass and see if you get the same experience when watching Bush— the skin-crawling reaction that has beget the international “Bush hating” phenomenon. That skin-crawling feeling is the repulsion most of feel toward a liar, and that is what will bring this liar in the White House down, hard.