Tom Tomorrow has started a neat little game where one counts all the comparisons being made between Bush's "kill them before they kill us" foreign policy stance and the "Precrime cops" in Minority Report.

What I'm wondering, is whether this is going to be Bush's "Wag the Dog". Clinton got hoist by his own petard for bad timing of a rocket attack in Sudan and every second headline said he was "Wagging the Dog", named after an excellent movie where a president facing reelection in an atmosphere of sexual scandal decides to create a war in order to retain his popularity. It was mostly just bad timing on his part (and lucky timing on Osama's part), but it does illustrate how random acts of popular culture can end up defining politics. After all, the trailers for Minority Report imply that the concept of "Precrime" is deeply flawed, and the reviews seem to indicate that the film is both excellent and will likely be enormously successful, enough so to perhaps influence our popular and political culture. Forget making comparisons.. if the movie is critical of the concept, will people start criticizing Bush based on the parallels? Will this movie actually influence policy?

While critics of Bush's Iraq policy like myself aren't exactly displeased with the general public starting to twig to what's really going on, it's a little strange that it may be due to really, really convenient timing.