Set your HD TV onto “Get Me Roger Stone,” the Netflix documentary on the recently-arrested politico, and you can almost hear Adele wailing the Skyfall theme in the background. It isn’t so much that the longtime Republican operative is the MI6 agent, it’s that he thinks he is that makes this an entertaining watch.
Oh, don’t kid yourself; it’s another leftist treatment of a conservative that is supposed to look even-handed. There are cameo appearances of Tucker Carlson, Paul Manafort and even POTUS, who all sat for the Netflix cameras – but it is Jeffrey Toobin who is the main thread of the documentary, and that tells you pretty much all you need to know about it.
A Stone-Cold Groove
Nevertheless, once you are tuned into the filmmaker’s bias, “Get Me Roger Stone” is amusing. And what makes it so is the subject matter, which is so profane, so irreverent, and so very riveting. What can you say about a guy who taunts the special prosecutor to arrest him, calls the cameramen following him a bunch of lefty filmmakers and has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back?
It’s an odd juxtaposition: The more Toobin and his cohorts at Netflix try to color Stone evil, the more the viewer becomes entranced by him. Who can keep their eyes off the Stone-cold audacity of a man jet-setting around Manhattan in the back of a stretch limo, wearing bespoke threads, and designer eyeglasses evocative of Truman Capote? Watching it with a mildly political friend who was silent for most of the documentary provided a window into the fascination of Stone’s persona. Apropos of nothing, she averred, “I think this guy’s had pec-implants.”
Truman Capote
The fact that Roger J. Stone, Jr. has made a tidy sum off his impertinent and brazen Stone-isms and shameless self-promotion has the left circling the dumpster in shock and revulsion. They so want the viewer to transfer these negative feelings over to the president who is, after all, not a person but rather a creation of Stone. The underlying message of “Get Me Roger Stone” is that the Republican operative is Bil Baird, with Trump as Charlemane the Lion. Thus, the most famous puppeteer of the 20th century has been pulling the strings of his creation ever since, feeding the loony leftist assumption that Trump world is an apparition because we are really living in The Stone Zone.
Exposing False Piety
Above all, the left finds Roger Stone a terrifying figure because they take his theatrical flamboyance literally (this is a serial mistake they make regarding Mr. Trump as well). But the wild and unruly operative uses their derision and displeasure to fuel his affectations. Those on the right identify his campiness and understand the droll, satirical nature of Stone’s words, where “the truth is in the joke.” That leftists find the Republican strategist to be a political sleaze-bag of the first order has conservatives howling, because Stone has the left’s humorless number and refuses to acknowledge their false piety.
One senses this is a guy who will not go quietly into the night for Robert Mueller and his henchman, and that sort of defiance is what separates the political left and right in America. You didn’t see any well-armed Jeffrey Toobins standing at the mouth of Gold Butte in the Battle of Bunkerville for a reason. On the other hand, one can imagine Roger Stone at the Bundy Ranch standoff, peering from behind the brush with a .30 Aught saying, “I’ve got a clear shot at four of them government commies.”
And that perhaps is the attraction and power of Roger Stone that some on the right find seductive. Liberty-minded individuals recognize that from Patrick Henry on down, the revolutionaries all had a streak of Stone in them. And that didn’t turn out too badly now, did it?
