Wag the Dog/YMMV

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• Crowning Moment of Funny: "Somebody get me a KITTEN!"
• Ear Worm: "God bless the men of the 303!"
• Funny Aneurysm Moment: This movie was frequently cited after Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles in an attempt to destroy an Al-Quaeda meeting during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After all, it's not as if a bunch of rag-tag terrorists in Afghanistan were a major threat to the United States...
  • To say nothing of the Kosovo War (which, arguably, was more necessary).
  • Protesters still reference it in comparison to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. And health-care reform for some unknown reason.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The film concerns a sleazy President of the US who starts an entirely fake war in the Balkans to divert attention from a sex scandal. Shortly after it was released, President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his sexual escapades, and then went to war in the Balkans. The coincidence was much talked about at the time, although the Kosovo war was all too real... and had been planned for almost a year in advance, with frequent mention on NPR.
  • Except that Clinton had been dealing with sex scandals since before he was elected President (Gennifer Flowers, anyone?), and America had been expected to intervene in the war in the Balkans for years. There's nothing at all prescient about the movie: it was based on Clinton.
  • Watching it after 9/11 makes it even harsher, with the idea of terrorists from some backwater country that "hate freedom" and want to "destroy our way of life". Even more so is the idea claiming that the (non-existent) Albanian terrorists want to infiltrate the US via Canada to any Canadian familiar with changes to the border traffic after 9/11 and numerous false accusations from the US of terrorists coming into their country from Canada.
    • This only gets worse when you remember one of the arguments commonly made for keeping Bush in place in 04 was that 'you don't change horse in the middle of a race.' Ominously similar to one of the movie's more known quotes.
• Memetic Mutation: The title has entered general use to refer to media manipulation and political campaign showmanship.
• Paranoia Fuel: Everything you may think you know about the rest of the world, about the news, about history, could have easily been made up.
  • A lot of what people popularly remember from history was made up. Very often public accounts of history are tainted by bias of those writing during or after the period, painting things how they thought they were or how just how they wanted people to perceive them. See List of Common Misconceptions - History.