Boogie Man (2008)

Image credit: George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

RIGHT WING ROCK 'N' ROLL Lee Atwater in Stefan Forbes' documentary Boogie Man

If you want to hear juicy inside tales of the scams devised by Lee Atwater, the right-wing visionary of media-age dirty tricks, you'll find loads of them in Boogie Man. Stefan Forbes' incisive portrait of the late, infamous Republican consultant is a chronicle of how the culture 
 war took over American politics. 
 As such, it could scarcely be more timely. (Karl Rove was Atwater's protégé.) Atwater, who relished playing rock & blues guitar almost as much as he loved slinging mud, had his first dark victory in 1978, when he smeared Max Heller — a Holocaust survivor running for U.S. Congress — with a campaign that claimed Heller didn't believe in the Lord. After that, there was Willie Horton, Whitewater — the hits kept coming. In terrific clips, we see the scampish gleam of mischief that shot out of Atwater's steely eyes, giving him the look of a honky-tonk Daniel Craig. His great strategy, and legacy, was the art of lying out in the open. He saw that character assassination invades media like an airborne virus — that even a lie can become its own ''truth.'' B+