I’ve been coughing so hard and so much these past four days, I suspect I’ll soon have an aneurysm.  I just spent the past couple days at my mom’s, trying to recover.

Through that time, I went to see Oliver Stone’s W., and listened to Colin Powell deliver his endorsement of Barack Obama on Meet the Press.

Maybe it’s the cough medicine talking, but I felt think the critics have been a bit too harsh on W.  There’s no question about Oliver Stone’s biases, but overall I think it was a fairly straightforward and even sympathetic biopic.  Yes, it assumes that you believe as Stone does — that George W. Bush has oedipal issues, that he was out of his depth as President, and that he is incurious and incompetent.  Provided you’re on board with that premise, you may — as I do — view the film as a tragedy about a man who has spent his life both living up to and challenging his father, a relationship which brings him to make some very bad decisions.  

It’s certainly not Stone’s greatest work, but it’s not at travesty, either.  In the end, Stone made me feel sorry for Bush — it’s a point missing from the reviews and the trailers that suggest the film is a comedy.  I also felt angry at him for pursuing and achieving the presidency and for listening to cranks like Dick Cheney.  We may never figure out just what we feel collectively about George W. Bush and what he did, but this was a decent attempt at starting the discussion.

Colin Powell is painted as the failed voice of reason in W. — a tragic figure in his own right — and there is no greater example of that than in his endorsement today for Barack Obama.  A career military man and lifelong conservative (and anyone who would like to dispute this fact, should really go back and look at what he’s said on record before blathering on about how this isn’t true), it clearly wasn’t easy for Powell to make his decision.  But like Christopher Buckley and others, it seems that all the smart people have been run out of the Republican party by the guys with pitchforks and torches.  This doesn’t make them Democrats, but we’re more than happy to welcome them into our Big Tent.

I’m not sure if it will change anyone’s minds at this point, but it may make moderates in the Republican party who question the overall tone and tactics of the McCain campaign (as well as McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin) feel a little better about voting for Obama on Nov. 4. 

A part of me would like to see Powell get a second shot at the State Department to fix the things he couldn’t fix in the first Bush term.  I know this won’t happen, but I love nothing better than a good redemption story.