This is obscene . . .

Ambassador Joe Wilson told Larry King last night that he and his wife Valerie Plame have signed a deal with Warner Bros of Hollywood to offer their consulting services - or maybe more - in the making of the forthcoming movie about the Libby trial.

It is not clear whether the former ambassador with the flowing grey mane will play himself or whether Harrison Ford could step up to the plate.

Frankly, this doesn't reflect very well on Wilson. Exploiting the second biggest crime against America after 9/11 - namely, lying our nation into war - for his own personal gain is decidedly not good.

But, more importantly, turning this into a movie is a deliberate effort to minimize the importance and gravity of the criminal conduct that led us into war by blurring the lines between reality and entertainment.

This is an outrage.

Now, the 'producers' can weave into it whatever they want and THAT will become the reference to which future generations will turn for 'facts' because it's more 'entertaining' than a historical account or documentary.

Will Cate Blanchett take the part of Valerie Plame or will the blond beauty appear as herself?

The names are made for Hollywood. Valerie Plame sounds like someone out of a Raymond Chandler thriller.

Scooter Libby could have been dreamt up by Quentin Tarantino for a remake of Reservoir Dogs.

Libby, the diminutive, courteous and mildly poetic consigliere reminds me of Posca, Caesar's freed slave and flunky in the HBO drama Rome. He even sports an uncannily Roman hairstyle.

Courteous and mildly poetic???

The whitewash is well underway.

Heroes and villains

The backdrop of Washington intrigue and backstabbing is of course a gift for any movie maker.

As President Harry Truman once said: "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog!" The conflict in Iraq adds the necessary poignancy.

I can see the studio bosses salivating now. "This material practically writes itself," they will exclaim.

But does it? Who are the heroes and who are the villains?

Even the jury admitted that it sympathised with the defendant, although not enough to exonerate him from the specific question at hand: did Scooter lie under oath?

As the valiant and lonesome champion of truth who takes on the mighty administration and its henchmen in the White House of black lies, Ambassador Joe Wilson seems a little too glamorous.

By the way, I have a few questions. If he discovered in the summer of 2002 after his trip to Niger that Saddam Hussein was not trying to buy yellow cake concentrated uranium in Africa, why did it take him a year to go public?

Should he not have piped up in the run-up to war, at a time when the administration was making its arguments about WMD and not after the invasion had already taken place? [??? What is he talking about?]

And, I am sorry, but how could someone as unavoidably stunning as Valerie Plame ever go undercover? It would be like having Madonna as a store detective!

The role of the villain is also not as obvious as it may seem.

What did I tell you?

They can and will 're-write' history as they see fit.

The man who actually leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent was the former number two to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the solidly built, "tell-it-like-it-is" Dick Armitage.

By all accounts he passed on the relevant information to the journalist Robert Novak as a piece of gossip.

Mr Armitage did not even know that Ms Plame had been undercover.

He wanted to highlight the fact that Ambassador Joe Wilson had been dispatched on his high-level fact finding mission to Niger by none other than his own wife.

In other words, Ambassador Wilson was the beneficiary of a marital junket. What is more Dick Armitage was always quietly against the Iraq War. So, in Hollywood terms he would make a lousy villain.

'Prince of Darkness'

That leaves the vice-president.

OK, I admit, this one is easy. After all, Dick Cheney has been rehearsing for the part of Prince of Darkness ever since he was in his mid-30s.

Remember too, it was the vice-president who was put in charge of the exploratory committee to find a suitable candidate for vice president by George W Bush.

He reached the conclusion that no-one could do the job better than himself. So let Dick play Dick. No actor would come close.

The problem here is not so much the characterisation but the plot.

This trial may have revealed how the administration went after one critic. But it failed to produce the smoking gun, the one phrase, the one picture, the one fingerprint that might have nailed the vice president to the conspiracy.

So given all these loose ends could "Scooter Libby, The Verdict" ruin the administration?

I doubt it.

Libby's crime may be rooted in the lingering questions about why we went to war. But it no longer comes as a surprise.

America has had three years to get used to the idea that the administration did not exactly err on the side of caution when it came to pre-war intelligence.

No big deal, right? WRONG.

Americans demand and will get JUSTICE.

Casualties of war

What the public wants to know now is how the troops can come home with minimal losses, a shred of dignity and the avoidance of a regional war.

The stakes are too high for Middle America to lose sleep about what Scooter said and when he said it.

His goose is cooked. The scandal is just another log on the fire of dismay and disappointment in a White House that has long lost credibility.

The rats and mould at the Walter Reed medical facility have probably inflicted far more damage on the administration than Tuesday's guilty verdict.

I was struck by a black-and-white photograph dating back to 2003. It showed Dick Cheney conferring with Don Rumsfeld while Scooter Libby looks on attentively.

One has been sacked, one will probably go to jail - unless the president pardons him - and one has been sidelined.

They are, after all, the most high-profile casualties of their own war.

There is only one way the Libby saga can scoot to the next more damaging chapter. And that is if Scooter reveals the grimy entrails of the Bush White House.

That is assuming he possesses genuine, incriminating information AND the public is prepared to believe a man who has been convicted of lying under oath.

In Hollywood they have a word for scripts that are bought by a studio but never made into a movie. They are "optioned".

In other words, tabled, monopolized, reserved exclusively for the powers that be to decide when, where and how the events are portrayed on film.

Mainstream Media is in on everything.

Posted in

• brainwash
• distraction
• exploitation
• fantasy
• Hollywood
• Media
• reality

• qrswave's blog
• Login or register to post comments