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11/11/2005:

"SCOOTER’S SEX SHOCKER"

Of all the scribbled sentences that have converged to create the Valerie Plame affair the most remarkable, in literary terms, may belong to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’ recently deposed chief of staff. “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,” he wrote in a jailhouse note to Judith Miller. Meant as a waiver of confidentiality, the letter touched off the sort of fevered exegesis more often associate with readings of “The Waste Land” than of legal correspondence. For even more difficult prose, however, one must revisit a earlier work. “The Apprentice”—Libby’ 1996 entry in the long and distinguishe annals of the right-wing dirty novel—tell the tale of Setsuo, a courageous virgin innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and war.

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire (“[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted ‘Arragghrrorwr!’ in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him”) to Buckley (“I’d rather do this with you than play cards”) to Liddy (“T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .”) to Ehrlichman (“ ‘It felt like a little tongue’ ”) to O’Reilly (“Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants”), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney’s books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.
newyorker.com