W.

  
The Bush presidency might well be the Jerry Bruckheimer presidency — after the hugely successful producer of "Armageddon," "Black Hawk Down" and "Top Gun," the movie re-enacted by Mr. Bush in his flyboy landing on the Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Bruckheimer has enjoyed a happy partnership with the Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon from the get-go. While the nation and the administration snoozed in the late spring of 2001, unaware that the next Pearl Harbor was less than four months away, the gala premiere party for Bruckheimer's summer extravaganza, "Pearl Harbor," took place on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis, which had been sent from San Diego to Hawaii for the festivities. As Ben Affleck and a giddy corps of press junketeers watched, F-15 fighters flew overhead and Navy Seals parachuted onto the deck from a Black Hawk helicopter. This year Mr. Bruckheimer and the defense department collaborated once more, on an ABC prime-time entertainment series, "Tales From the Front Lines," which presented the American mission in Afghanistan as an MTV-paced joy ride.

The White House has absorbed the Bruckheimer aesthetic so fully that its "Top Gun" was better, not to mention briefer, than the original (no obligatory Kelly McGillis love story, for starters). Just as the Stennis had been rerouted for the "Pearl Harbor" party, so the return of the Lincoln and its eagerly homeward-bound troops was delayed by a day to accommodate the pageantry of Mr. Bush's tailhook landing. Though the Secret Service wouldn't let the president go through with his plan to fly "one of the sexier fighter jets," according to CBS News, his arrival in a four-seat S-3 was more than sexy enough. He emerged from the cockpit draped in more combat gear than a Tom Cruise stunt double. On "Saturday Night Live," Tina Fey subjected the photographic record of his getup to close scrutiny and wondered if he had stuffed "socks down the front of the jump suit."

-- Frank Rich, New York Times