What's happening now in Washington is known, in American-cinematic terms, as the closing of the West. Slowly, sadly, guns turned to gavels and duels to debates. When you hunted a man down, you couldn't string him up anymore. Instead, you were supposed to bring him in and let the politicians screw it up.
Nobody filmed that tragic two-step better than Sam Peckinpah, and maybe nothing in his blood-spattered canon fits this Bill better than Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). It's a nicely toasted Wild Bunch, in which James Coburn's grizzled Garrett reluctantly hunts down his ex-buddy William Bonney to the funereal thrum of Bob Dylan "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" (Dylan also has a sizable role in the film as "Alias" and aquits himself admirably).
The Beltway version of the story, alas, is not particularly poignant. Ken and Billy Clinton never had much of a past, except that maybe they used to ride the same rough Baptist beast. (Clinton, of course, uses his Good Book like a first aid kit; Starr's is more the kind you lay your hand on before they send you away.)
Peckinpah's ode covers the same sad landscape, peopled with a full cast of filthy semi-knowns, and just as in Clinton's White House, whomever the central drama brushes against regrets it: Slim Pickens, Richard Jaeckel, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton -- even Elisha Cook Jr., whose remarkable career spanned from The Maltese Falcon to Magnum, P.I. and beyond.
The take-home message is that everybody dies, including Garrett, and when your guns are loaded for porn (or porn cover-ups), everybody gets soiled. Including Henry Hyde. Including Dan Burton (what, no tears?). Including the White House. Including us. It'd be sad if we weren't having so much fun.