After all the effort Gordon Brown put into getting friendly with Bush's treasury secretary John Snow, the word is out that Snow will have melted away by the spring, to be replaced by the current White House chief of staff Andy Card. But Snow is fighting back, promising to come up with a concrete tax reform proposal for congress by the end of the year. This is just the sort of topic-changing new idea Bush needs, and just the sort of tax-bashing bill that worried Republican congressmen can campaign on in the run-up to next November's elections. Snow is also coming out with strong Greenspan-like warnings against the problem of the deficit, just as establishment bodies like the Council on Foreign Relations start fretting in public. The council is pushing a new report by Menzie Chinn, who served as a senior economist on the White House council of economic advisers during both the Bush and the Clinton administrations: it doesn't get more bipartisan establishment than that. Chinn's report for the council agonises over the combination of the budget and trade deficits, and concludes: "Failure to take the initiative to reduce the twin deficits will cede to foreign governments increasing influence over the nation's fate. Perhaps equally alarming, it will lead to slower growth, escalating trade friction and reduced American influence in political and economic spheres." Of course, Snow would not have uttered a peep had Dick Cheney still been a power in the land. Snow's predecessor, Paul O'Neill, recounts Cheney's rebuff—"Deficits don't matter. Reagan proved that." They do now; Greenspan said so.
Is Perle next for Fitzgerald?
Could there be a curse of the neocons? Now that Scooter Libby is under indictment, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald can start thinking about his other neocon target, the prince of darkness himself: Richard Perle. Wearing his other hat as US attorney in Chicago, Fitzgerald is running the inquiry into Perle's role as a director of Conrad Black's ill-fated Hollinger International. Perle has already been told that the Securities and Exchange Commission "has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit." Another of the grand names on Hollinger's masthead, Rick Burt, a former ambassador to Germany, tells friends that his legal bills have already gone beyond $2m, and that was before Henry Kissinger and other directors reached a private settlement in a $50m lawsuit against them. It looks as if the "free Scooter" legal aid fund may not get much help from Perle.
The literature of Libby
If Scooter does get to spend some time as a guest of Uncle Sam, he will have the leisure to return to his former pursuit of fiction. His 1996 novel The Apprentice, set in Japan in 1903, features sexual encounters even rougher than those that are said to distinguish the US prison system. A newly orphaned little girl is ritually raped by her samurai uncles, people have sex with deer, and the brothels are very odd indeed. "At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."
Mrs Cheney's lost masterpiece
What is it with these God-fearing conservative moralists once they get pen in hand? Perhaps Scooter got the idea of the spicy novel from his former boss's wife. Lynne Cheney penned Sisters, a gothic tale of lesbian love on the American frontier, or, as the blurb of the 1981 paperback put it, "the novel of a strong and beautiful woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier." Copies are very hard to find, after the second lady firmly squashed an attempt to republish her almost lost masterpiece. A sample: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage—no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were." Although this in itself would have justified her later appointment to run the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tumbler always preferred Mrs Cheney's later offering, The Body Politic, in which a Republican vice-president passes away, "blissfully, at age 59, in carnal arrest." After a strenuous session with a sexy television correspondent, the chap has a heart attack but dies wearing a "beatific smile."
The McCain rumourmill
John McCain is being very coy about the report that has swept the blogosphere, suggesting that at the peak of the White House panic before Fitzgerald indicted Libby, he had been approached as a possible replacement vice-president if Dick Cheney suddenly decided that his heart problems required his resignation. "No, no, and—er—no," was his less than specific response to a polite enquiry before he swiftly changed the subject. But liberal Democratic senator Russ Feingold, something of a long shot for his party's 2008 nomination, thinks McCain will be the man to beat, noting, "If he wins the Republican primaries, I think the chances of the Democrats winning the White House that year are going to be pretty thin. I think we all know that."
