Courtesy of Lionsgate

There’s a scene in Oliver Stone’s biopic W. in which President George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) receives the news in a Cabinet meeting that there are no WMDs in Iraq, listens to Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) sputter excuses, and tells them all to dig deeper: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … You can’t get fooled again.” This is, of course, one of the most legendary “Bushisms,” but in life it was blithered at a press conference, and its transplant to a Cabinet meeting doesn’t jibe with what people who’ve met Bush say: that in private he’s in control of his (simpleminded) language, that it’s only before the public and press that he has trouble synthesizing talking points that other people have written for him and that he doesn’t necessarily believe. Stone and the screenwriter, Stanley Weiser, don’t seem to understand the difference between public and private discourse, which is one reason W. skates along the surface. There’s no idiomatic dialogue — it’s all talking points.