4. Bill Clinton Sex Scandal - Wag the Dog
Barry Levinson's thorny satire Wag the Dog is about the President of the United States being rumbled as he tries to sleep with a Girl Scout. The POTUS' publicist (Robert De Niro) enlists the help of a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to stage a fake war in order to draw some of the heat away from the Presidential scandal; the titular term refers to the fact that the politicians controlling the media is like a tail wagging its own dog. The term took on a higher cultural significance when Bill Clinton's sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky broke in December 1997, and within three days of Clinton actually owning up to it, he announced that the US had started bombing Afghanistan and Sudan to bits, a shocking revelation that was clearly aimed to distract from his own personal headline-making issues. The parallel of the two would be hilarious if not for the eerie similarity; I suppose at least the military action from Clinton's administration was (apparently) real, whereas in the movie it is pure artifice.