Dem-Rep factional leader Jeb Bush. Tepid, uninspiring, and a lackluster debater, he's completely failed to deliver the faction's platform in the PRUSA, and its vote share has increasingly declined as the population moves even further left than it already is and Dem-Rep policies become even more unpopular (and Bush refuses to change for fear of alienating "the base").
(note: This was loosely inspired by something I saw in one of the alternate Wikipedia infoboxes threads, I think, I liked the name and the idea of Bush 2 being an actor playing an action hero in what is effectively a mockbuster of the Shrub's greatest flop lines.)
Jeb Bush's older brother, Walker Bush, in a publicity still for the 2001 alternate-history action film
The Decider.
The Decider is about retired American Marine Colonel Wade Williams, a former special warfare operator, whose physicist daughter (Julia Stiles) is kidnapped by the sinister forces of a totalitarian regime from another dimension. Pursuing the kidnappers, Williams finds himself in a dystopian alternate reality where the MacArthur regime won the Second American Civil War. Williams's doppelganger, President Rickard, is the officially democratically elected leader of the United States, but the country is really run by a sinister cabal of business interests, right-wing churches who preach homophobia and hardline anti-abortion rhetoric, and racist goons, all led by a figure called the Decider, who communicates with the cabal via telescreen and whose identity is known only to his bodyguards and a few loyal minions. This America is an oppressive, xenophobic, hyper-militarized borderline Nat-Pop regime where the slightest dissent is brutally punished and crimes such as "wearing un-American clothing" or "insufficiently Christian religious leanings" are punishable by being beaten up or killed by the Decider's secret police and roving goon squads of paramilitary enforcers. Xenophobic, racist, ultranationalist rhetoric is pumped out of loudspeakers on every street corner and failure to salute the flag and praise God, MacArthur, and the Decider at sporting events is cause for arrest and "disappearance".
Being a right-thinking Syndicalist man who was considered for the Hero of Syndicalist Labor and whose patriotism is unquestioned (i.e. a suitably stereotypical American action-movie protagonist), Williams decides that he's going to rescue his daughter, destroy the totalitarian US, and punch the Decider in the face, not necessarily in that order. He beats up a few paramilitaries who question the proudly Red Williams for "potential counter-patriotic Socialist leanings", gets in touch with a (suitably ethnically diverse for American audiences) local resistance group, and with there help infiltrates a meeting of the Decider's cabal to figure out where his daughter is. He's discovered, however, when the Decider announces via telescreen that he is an impostor, and Williams slaughters his way out, but not before getting the intel he needed from a cowardly KKK thug.
The Decider is going to use a secret bunker under the White House, with Williams's daughter's at-gunpoint help, to invade the PRUSA with an army of fanatical goons, right in the middle of the Columbia Proletarian District. The Resistance helps Williams attack the White House on I-Day, as President Rickard gives a bombastic villainous speech to the nation from a balcony. Rickard retreats to the bunker as Williams shoots his way in, tearing through the incompetent Nat-Pop/capitalist-imperialist minions like Swiss cheese, and Williams reaches the bunker. There, he discovers President Rickard, planning to escape to the PRUSA's Earth and take Williams's place and destroy the PRUSA from within. A full-scale battle breaks out above, and Williams and Rickard fight, as Rickard reveals that
he is the true dictator of America, declaring "I'm the Decider, Wade!". Using villainous fighting techniques, the Decider/Rickard begins to gain the upper hand over Williams, before Williams's daughter hits him over the back of the head with a wrench, allowing Williams to gain the upper hand.
Williams defeats Rickard/The Decider, impaling him through the head on a spike of broken metal from their fight, and changes clothes with him, before mounting the stairs and ordering the Decider's armies to stand down. When one of the Decider's minions questions his orders, Williams shoots him and, in a perfect delivery of Rickard's catchphrase line, says, "You do what I say, because I'm the Decider." The goons surrender, and Williams's daughter contacts the PRUSA leadership to bring occupation forces through.
Six months later, PRUSA forces have come through the portal and are repairing the ex-MacArthurite America, and Williams, after overseeing the demolition of the last monument to the Decider, returns home to his family with his daughter.
The Decider was a massive financial success despite mixed critical reviews. Audiences loved its unapologetically stupid plot, cartoonish villains, naked fanboying over the PRUSA's action-movie staples, and just in general being good dumb popcorn fare, while critics trashed it for its lazy alternate-history, plot holes, and gratuitously cheesy lines (the repetition of
I'm the Decider! was seen as particularly dumb), but praised Bush's "disturbingly affable" performance as Rickard/The Decider. It spawned a successful movie franchise, currently on its 6th film, with a new lead actor.
Walker Bush on set for the 2003 film
The Decider 2: Pelley's America. The last to star Bush in the leading role, this film featured Stiles's character, physicist Jane Williams, more heavily, and introduced Wade's sidekick and future star Major Jessie Wayne (Angelina Voight).
Two years after
The Decider, the PRUSA has surgically excised most of the Decider's regime, and is finalizing the turnover of power to the former Resistance. However, a dramatic bombing attack on Detroit is revealed to be the prelude to an attack from another alternate timeline, this one featuring American Union State troops backed up by Russians. Retired Marine Wade Williams, the doppelganger of the deceased dictator President Rickard/The Decider, is enjoying a day out with his daughter when the attack occurs, and helps another Marine on leave, young Major Jessie Wayne, gun down hundreds of AUS and Russian invaders before PRUSA regulars arrive to drive the invaders back. Williams and Wayne, along with Jane (Williams's daughter the physicist), are transported via helicopter to a mobile PRUSA base located on the carrier
Proletarian Freedom. They are offered a mission, volunteers only--infiltrate the newly-discovered third timeline, determine the source of the incursion, and end it for good. Wayne accepts, but Williams is hesitant until his daughter volunteers, at which point he objects but is convinced to come along to keep her safe since she won't back down.
Williams, Jane, and Wayne discover that the third timeline is run by a Nat-Pop regime--America is divided between a Chinese Nat-Pop-dominated Pacific States, a Savinkovite Russian-ruled Canada, and a Nat-Pop American Union State as the junior partner of the other two (Alaska is Russian). They make contact with Afrikan forces--Africa in this timeline being a fortress continent dominated by the descendants of German, French, and British exiles and native Africans who have turned the continent into a gigantic arms factory to fight the Nat-Pop forces, knowing that they're slated for extermination if they fall. The Afrikans are highly militarized, a bit nutty (some of them worship Lettow-Vorbeck as a deity and others think that if they die bravely that Jesus will take them to Valhalla), but generally decent since at least they aren't racist and treat their people with basic humanity. Wayne and the Williamses work with the Afrikans to figure out a way to defeat the Nat-Pops; they discover that Williams's duplicate is a KKK priest in Nat-Pop America, Jane's duplicate was purged for suggesting that black people might be humans, and Wayne's duplicate is an evil, seductive assassin working for the Nat-Pops. Infiltrating a Russian installation, Williams and Wayne find that Savinkov is a decaying despot supported by advanced medical science and unable to leave his throne, but he knows he's going to die soon and wishes to invade and annihilate every peaceful timeline he can find as a "fuck you" to those he deems inferior.
Shooting their way out (and exploding, and ramming, and other ridiculous action fare), Wayne and Williams rendezvous with Jane and bring through PRUSA backup, but serious numbers are impossible to get through without being detected. Using a PRUSA bomb, the trio plan to destroy Savinkov's palace when he summons his minions to meet with him, thereby decapping the Nat-Pop leadership and allowing the Afrikans to get enough of a foothold that the PRUSA and its new friends in the former Decider's timeline can send support. The plan hits a snag, however, as Williams is discovered in disguise as his double before Jane's finished setting the bomb, and Wayne and Williams resort to that age-old staple of American action movies, massive amounts of lead fired in the general direction of the enemy, accompanied by loud, flashy explosions and punching.
Williams is badly injured by Savinkov's henchmen, and Wayne has to choose between saving him or saving Jane, who's been cornered by more Nat-Pops, including Wayne's duplicate. Wayne saves Jane and blows a few Nat-Pops' heads off, including her duplicate's, but fortunately Williams is able to brutally kill the guys trying to kill him with his Ka-Bar. Jane and Wayne kiss, and the trio run away really fast (Williams himself being carried by the ladies) just before the bomb blows up behind them.
Afrikan and Internationale troops backed up by the countries from the Decider's Earth swiftly invade the Nat-Pop nations, and the leaderless enemy, already inept at best, are swiftly dispatched. The Williamses and Wayne return home, a still-beaten-up Williams jokingly threatening to "go Cassius Clay on your ass" to Wayne if she breaks Jane's heart.
The Decider 2 was critically panned but a box-office success, with audiences turning out despite critical scorn heaped on the "beyond ridiculous" plot, the gratuitously dark and violent setting, and the complete inability of any thinking creature to take the film seriously. However, most of the less stuffy ones admitted that it was kind of fun and had some pretty explosions.
Angelina Voight as Marine Corps Major Jessie Wayne in 2004's
The Decider 3: The Golden Circle. The first film to feature Wayne as the principal protagonist, with only a cameo from Wade Williams (Walker Bush), it was a major star turn for Voight, both securing her status as a bankable star and first-rate actress, and causing a tabloid sensation as the notoriously adrenaline-addicted Voight carried on a torrid backstage romance with co-star Julia Stiles.
Marine Corps Major Jessie Wayne is being awarded the Hero of Syndicalist Labor with Wade Williams for their actions in
Pelley's America. Afterwards, Wayne is approached by her love interest, physicist Jane Williams (Julia Stiles), who tells Wayne that the PRUSA government is moving to scout out parallel Earths, intending to recruit friendly Earths to a transdimensional Internationale and defeat imperialistic or otherwise villainous alternates. Wayne accepts Jane's job offer, and the two are sent to an alternate universe where the Confederacy won the first Civil War.
Wayne and her lover make contact with the Black Panther resistance movement, and plan to destroy the villainous Empire of Columbia that straddles the Americas like an evil plantation colossus. They lead a raid on Richmond, Virginia--renamed Confederacytown, Glorious Southron Rebellion--and successfully blow up an arms depot--but Wayne realizes the explosion was too small. The depot was empty, a trick, and the Black Panther base has been ambushed and destroyed by Confederate forces. Wayne and Jane Williams replace their doubles, and, suffering pretending to be married to irritating white male planters, manage to infiltrate the Confederate government headquarters, successfully capturing important intel--and realizing that the entire mission's been a setup. The PRUSA has been infiltrated by duplicates from the alternate Earth.
While Jane uses a hacked database of Confederate agents to expose the traitors, Wayne attacks a set of Confederate assassins sent to kill the Chair of the People's Congress during the signing of a treaty between the three now-allied Earths from the first two movies. After a brutal battle, she defeats them, and the Confederates are forced to surrender by the combined might of three Earths (admittedly one of them rather more beat-up than the others, but the movie had much larger leaps in logic than this).
Wayne is awarded another Hero of Syndicalist Labor for saving the Chair of the People's Congress, and proposes to Jane, who accepts.
The Decider 3: The Golden Circle was another solid hit, although critics mostly panned the absurd alternate Earth and the cheesy dialogue. However, some praised the twist in the plot as keeping the movie a little more original and interesting than the previous movie.
Voight starred in the next three
Decider movies, and is currently one of the most famous actors in the Screen Actors' Guild Of America, as well as being elected Chair of the Directors' Association of America during her tenure as a director. (The performing-arts unions tend to be much less restrictive in membership criteria than others, since you tend to be doing more than one job in showbiz after a certain point)
