I've followed Steve Gaghan's career with interest, since he was a friend of mine in high school. I found a really interesting interview with him about researching the Syriana script.

A choice snippet:

(The energy crisis of the '70s comes up; specifically, how we didn't seem to learn anything from that.)

"It’s the same fuckers, man! It’s all the same Nixon guys; they got tossed out of office for a while with Carter. They came back with Reagan; they had a bad couple years under Poppy (George H. W. Bush), who wasn’t really hip to these guys, and then Clinton … and they’re all back! Just look at them! They’re all like a hundred and ten years old, they cut their teeth under the first Nixon administration ... they hang upside down like vampire bats when they’re out of power and they wait around. It’s the same guys: ‘Hey, don’t conserve energy! There’s no problem! Party on!’"