1. Who is I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby?
Scooter was one of the crazy cats who hung out on the beach with Annette and Frankie in the 1960s. When the scene died out, Libby kept himself real by selling hash on the Santa Monica pier. By the 1980s, he reinvented himself as a stock promoter, and he’s never looked back.
2. You’re doing it again. Really, who is “Scooter” Libby?
Darth Vader’s right hand stormtrooper.
3. Really? Apparently, Libby is in deep trouble. Doesn’t Vice President Dick Cheney protect his own?
Hands can be replaced. Didn’t you ever see The Empire Strikes Back?
Libby has been accused of leaking the name of a CIA agent to the press, which is against the law. So, as you might expect, he’s on trial for perjury.
Exactly. It doesn’t help that he wasn’t the one who did, in fact, leak the CIA agent’s name to the press.
6. How do you know that Libby wasn’t the leak?
The journalists he spoke with testified at his trial that he didn’t talk to them about it, and the journalists who wrote about the leak fingered just about everybody in the Bush administration BUT Libby. The smart money is that Darth Cheney and evil Rove Tarkin authorized and coordinated the leaking of the CIA agent’s name.
7. Why aren’t Rove and Cheney being prosecuted for authorizing the leak of the CIA agent’s name?
Oh, you’re so adorable! Can you please follow me home so I can keep you?
8. Umm, no. So, why would – hey, what is the name of the CIA agent, anyway?
Valerie Plame. As you might imagine, this gave newspaper headline writers – those impish wags – licence to go crazy with the puns: Playing The Plame Game; Plame It On Rio; Snakes on a Plame, and, of course; Put The Plame On…Anybody But Me.
9. Why would Rove and Cheney leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press?
She wouldn’t go with them to the prom.
What can I say? Rove and Cheney know how to hold a grudge. It explains a lot about the last seven years, though, doesn’t it?
11. Seriously, why would Rove and Cheney leak Valerie Plame’s name to the press?
They didn’t like her husband.
12. Okay, I like a good personal attack disguised as a joke as much as the next person, but –
No, seriously. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate whether or not the country had sold nuclear materials to Iraq. Naughty Niger. Or, at least, it would be if the stories about Niger’s midnight trysts with Iraq were true. However, as Wilson reported, the story was a hoax; despite this, the Bush administration pushed it anyway as part of its rationale for going to war with Iraq. You know, the whole “weapons of mass destruction” gag. When the President said those 17 words that every girl longs to hear (and, I’m not talking about the “I love you and want to worship at your altar for the rest of our natural lives” 17 words) in his State of the Union address, Wilson very publicly repeated his debunking of the story.
13. So, Rove and Cheney really outed Plame…?
To undermine her husband’s creditability by implying that the trip to Niger was an act of nepotism. Because, everybody knows that the CIA is prone to soft and squishy sentiments and, if anybody is going to soak them for a free trip anywhere, the first place they would choose to go is Niger.
Endangering all of her contacts and effectively ending her career, don’t forget, a career, I might add, in investigating weapons of mass destruction.
15. Yes, all of that. Why? Why would they do it?
Were you not paying attention when I wrote about how Cheney and Rove hold a grudge? You know, just because I write humour doesn’t mean that there isn’t some truth in it.
16. Who is prosecuting the case?
Patrick Fitzgerald, possibly the last free man in America.
17. Where was the President while all of this was going on?
Clearing brush out of the oval office.
Absolutely. He stood resolutely on the lawn of the White House and proclaimed that if anybody in his administration had in any way had a part in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s name to the press, they would never eat lunch at taxpayer’s expense in this town again.
They would have to get into their Dodges and drive out of, uhh…saddle up…
20. Can you say it without the “clever” cultural references?
They would be fired.
He’s still President, isn’t he?