Dubya, StonedWhy Oliver Stone had to bowdlerize our president's life story.

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Some Stone-friendly episodes are bypassed altogether. One bizarre scene related by Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in his new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, has warring administration factions racing to the hospital bed of a barely conscious Attorney General John Ashcroft. One faction urges him to sign his name to an illegal domestic wiretap plan; the other urges him not to. (He didn't, but the plan was implemented, anyway). Government dysfunction doesn't get more like the Marx Bros. than that. It's not in the movie.

W. portrays President Bush as a none-too-bright narcissist full of misplaced resentment because he doesn't measure up to his pedigree. But the movie doesn't include the most disturbing example I know of Bush's narcissism and resentment. That would be the passage in a 1999 Talk magazine profile by conservative writer Tucker Carlson in which Bush, then governor of Texas, mimics contemptuously the desperate pleas of Karla Faye Tucker—a murderer on death row—that Bush spare her life:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker's] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. "Did you meet with any of them?" I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. "No, I didn't meet with any of them," he snaps, as though I've just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. "I didn't meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Karla Faye Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like 'What would you say to Governor Bush?' "

"What was her answer?" I wonder.

"Please," Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "don't kill me."

Sometimes I marvel at the fact that Bush was able to get himself elected president—or even keep his job as governor—after making such a shocking statement. When the piece appeared, Bush quickly denied he'd said it, but he was very unconvincing. ("He just misunderstood how serious that was. … I think he misinterpreted my feelings. I know he did.") The press, as I've written before, stopped repeating the story not because it's untrue but simply because it seemed too ugly.

I suspect Stone felt the same way. W. is the rare Oliver Stone film that had to tone down the historical record because the truth was too lurid. How the hell do you tell the uncensored story of a guy like George W. Bush? No one would believe it.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

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