Scooter, you little devil!

As some of you may have surmised, I count journalism and media criticism among my many interests, so I've been following the U.S.'s Judith Miller saga for months. For those who haven't been paying attention to the latest twists and turns, her wikipedia entry provides a summary of this classic tale: Girl (Miller) meets boy (Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's now former chief of staff), boy feeds girl information about the name of an undercover CIA agent, girl gets in trouble and goes to jail for refusing to disclose sources, boy writes girl a truly freakish letter in jail full of purple prose, girl gets let loose and changes her mind about source-disclosing, boy gets indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements to the grand jury.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I haven't said anything about the Miller/Plame/Libby/Rove fiasco up until this point, but still feel moved to comment about the revelation that Scooter Libby is the author of a dirty novel published in the '90s. But alas for those who were already traumatized by his butchering of the English language in his letter to Miller in prison ("Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—-and life."), it actually does seem to be the case. As the article points out, Libby is in fine company among conservative American public figures turned writers of erotica--everyone from Dick Cheney's wife Lynne to stuffy right-wing columnist William Safire has already been there. But it seems Libby's novel is special. While many of the others tend to be more, shall we say, circumspect about the "dirty parts" in their stories, Libby's is apparently downright blatant, including homoeroticism, incest, and even zoophilia.

Who says the Religious Right doesn't know how to have fun?