Recently, I had the pleasure of watching “Goldfinger”, the greatest adventure in the long and multigenerational career of James Bond, on the dashingly appointed DVD put out by MGM/UA. You, yawning reader, should care about this, because my viewing experience happened within mere hours of the latest - and, to date, hardest - calamity to hit the closest approximation of that film’s titular character in the long and troubled history of Washington politics.
The arch villain I speak of, naturally, is Vice President Dick Cheney, who seems to have modeled his entire career in business and politics - particularly as CEO of Halliburton and architect of the Iraq War - on that of Auric Goldfinger, the “quite mad” gold baron who aims to control the entire gold supply of the United States and reap the benefits of economic chaos by detonating an atomic bomb in Fort Knox. And the calamity I refer to is, of course, the conviction of the Vice President’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on four of the five counts he was charged with in connection with the leak of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.
If the V.P., whom I shall hereafter refer to as Goldcheney, is today’s answer to 007’s most diabolical nemesis, it stands to reason, then, that Libby, having spent many years being “Cheney’s Cheney” (or maybe that’s “Goldcheney Goldcheney”) until he left the Chief of Staff post in the wake of the indictment, would be the Washington version of Goldfinger’s manservant, Oddjob. Truth be told, Libby is less like the judo-performing mute with the razor-trimmed bowler than the gold fetishist’s key operative, Kisch. Even obsessive viewers of the film may not remember this minor but frequently present character, who did Goldfinger’s bidding with as much zeal as Oddjob, especially in regards to wielding the gun that puts Bond to sleep midway through the film. Like Libby, Kisch is polished and eloquent, plus loyal to his boss - up to a point. He draws the line at the end of the adventure, when he is trapped in the Fort Knox safe with Oddjob, Bond and the ticking A-bomb. So, too, Libby could no longer be entirely counted on to hold his tongue and stand by his man once the “Plamegate” legal proceedings forced him to break ties with Big Daddy. And just as Kisch meets his end by being hurled several stories down the enormous, multilevel safe by the mute brute after attempting to defuse the bomb, so too Scooter has seen his career and, possibly, his personal freedom plummet thanks to being the fall guy, so to speak, for the “quite mad” oil baron and power fetishist he was so very loyal to. It should be noted that Libby got help in being shoved down the pike by Beltway brute Karl Rove, who most likely is the one who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity - and who most certainly is the Bush Administration’s Oddjob.
At least, in regards to Kisch’s - eh, Libby’s - personal freedom to walk the streets and renew his career as an erotic novelist, he will no doubt be granted a pardon by Bush, maybe even by the time you read this piece. This will be little consolation to Goldcheney, what with the cloud of suspicion still hanging over his former number two and, by extension, the operations of his office, and the possibility that the guilty verdict may embolden Patrick Fitzgerald, the most Bond-like prosecutor who doggedly pursued the investigation, to resume looking into the affairs the Vice, himself. No doubt, Goldcheney would like to strap Fitzgerald to a table and give him a laser-beam circumcision much like his cinematic mentor almost administered to Bond ... a not unlikely possibility given Goldcheney’s enthusiasm for waterboarding and other exotic applications of torture to prisoners at the various S and M detention centers set up by our nation’s Master of No Mercy. But, these days, even this most secretive of Vice Presidents is under more scrutiny than ever, and cannot dispatch revenge against his enemies as easily as he could just a few years ago. The prime example of this past luxury was the very vengeance trip which begat the troubles he is boiling in now: his and Rove’s outing of Plame in order to get back at her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, for being among the first brave souls to state, in print, in The New York Times, that the Administration’s case for war was more bogus than Goldfinger’s Operation Grand Slam.
To add to his legal obstacles, Goldcheney, himself, has recently experienced some explosive calamities straight out of nearly all 007 actioners, not least of which was the suicide bomber who targeted him during his recent visit to Afghanistan. This incident, it should be noted, happened just days after the first anniversary of his own, quite accidental, near-assassination of Henry Whittington, an embarrassing display of shooting skill that was worse than that of Tilly Masterson, the woman Bond unsuccessfully attempts to seduce after she unsuccessfully attempts to shoot down Goldfinger for killing her sister, Jill. Thanks to Goldcheney’s delaying reportage of this beer-inspired folly till he slept off the brew the next day, and initial attempts to blame Whittington for being in the way of his rifle, this mishap seemed less like Dean Martin sloshedly mowing down Jerry Lewis than Auric Goldfinger purposefully blasting at Mr. Ling, the Korean nuclear physicist that he needs to keep dead silent before he escapes Fort Knox when the U.S. Army arrives.
These brushes with death may have shaken Goldcheney up long enough to give an extra hug to wife Lynne and daughter Mary (and, perhaps, the longtime female companion Mary cannot wed, thanks to her father’s kissing of the gold-plated feet of the religious right) when he next met them. But these hair raising calamities have not softened the rage that has fueled the lust for world domination comparable to that of virtually every Bond villain from 1962’s Dr. No to last year’s Le Chiffre. Likewise, the recent revelations of the appalling conditions at Walter Reed Medical Center will not cause him to yield his determination to see the clearly hopeless Iraq war to the bitter end - or, at least, the end of his bitter term. Soldiers with amputated limbs and metal plates “convalescing” in rooms with mold, cockroaches and rodent feces are not going to melt the heart of a chickenhawk extraordinaire who, thanks to four draft deferments, so artfully avoided serving in another pointless, destructive war he has excoriated others for not serving in. This lack of concern for the broken patients of Walter Reed persists even despite being, himself, a frequent guest of many hospitals thanks to suffering, among a laundry list of other ailments, four heart attacks and a blood clot in his left leg. Then again, the medical institutions he has lumbered through have no doubt been spotlessly hygienic, state-of-the-art institutions, and are certainly not run by dunces like Lt. General Kevin C. Kiley, who, even though he lived across the street from the most infamous building at Walter Reed, never bothered to check on the squalor lived in by the soldiers who gave parts of their bodies in order to save Goldcheney’s booty.
As strange as it sounds, it would be hard to imagine even the most famous character played by German actor Gert Fröbe (who, thanks to his complete inability to speak English, had to have all of his lines dubbed) being as openly disrespectful of those around him as his real life counterpart. Indeed, Goldfinger is rather polite when he dispatches his enemies, making sure to bid Bond “good night” and “good morning” before each of his two attempts to destroy him. As the whole world should remember, Goldcheney, in June of 2004, when greeted with a “hello” on the Senate floor by Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading critic of Halliburton’s profiteering off the war in Iraq, responded with a bench-rattling “Go fuck yourself!” Even his friends haven’t been immune to his strange notion of charm, for during this same summer, while giving a speech on the campaign trail for his and Bush’s second run for office, he became so exasperated with the crowd’s frequent bursts of applause that he snapped, “Do you want me to finish?” While outbursts like these by a Vice Presidential candidate would make most running mates consider dumping them, the King George for whom Goldcheney acts as Gray Eminence had little to worry about. Karl “Oddjob” Rove and his minions in the key battleground states were, that same Swift Boat Summer, working day and night to fix voting machines, and giddily arranging ways to dissuade African-Americans and others likely to vote for John Kerry from getting to their polling stations, in order to steal this election from Kerry even more easily than the one they robbed from Al Gore.
President-elect Gore, thanks to the gold-plated Oscar (which, honor though it be, is far less impressive than the gold-painted Jill Masterson that Bond finds after being knocked out by the resourceful Oddjob) bestowed upon “An Inconvenient Truth”, the cinematic document of his worldwide lectures on global warming, is now seen by the left and even those who voted for Ralph Nader as nothing less than the James Bond of the Environment - and, should he decide to run again, the Presidency. Of course, he is also painted by the resentful right as a hypocritical Pussy Galore, telling folks to go green and use alternative fuels while hopping from one lecture stop to the next in a private plane worthy of the one piloted by 007’s most deceptive - and canny - female cohort (to Gore’s further credit, he has since gotten the right’s message and now travels by commercial airliners only). While I certainly don’t wish to see Goldcheney meet his end by having his massive girth sucked through a bullet hole at 35,000 feet, much like Goldfinger was ejected from Pussy’s air craft, I do hope that Patrick Fitzgerald, or better yet the Senate - for which the Darth Vader of the Vice Presidency, as he is more commonly known, is, sadly, the President - spearhead investigations against him that will land him in a cell more dank than the ones he has imprisoned so many “enemy combatants” in under flimsy or false pretenses.
As for the affair that brought Goldcheney a few steps closer to that cell, it is expected to be adapted into a major motion picture. If I and other followers of this spectacle - especially those who groove to Ian Fleming’s brainchild - had our druthers, no such filmization would be complete without an actor embodying the force who, as historian Robert Dallek accurately notes, will easily be the most interesting Vice President for a long time to come. If I, myself, had those druthers in the realm of casting, I would hand the role to character actor Bob Gunton. Though he looks nothing like the subject of this piece, it would be worth putting Gunton in heavy makeup and fat padding, for he exudes “Cheneyism” far more than any other actor I think of. This is due partly to his once having played RIchard Nixon - young Dick’s first Washington boss and a man who, in the view of the starstruck intern, was unjustly treated for the same type of wire tapping he and Little George would perform a grander scale thirty years later - but, more significantly, to the fact that Gunton’s most celebrated role is that of the corrupt, malevolent and terrifyingly Cheneyesque Warden Norton in “The Shawshank Redemption.” In the meantime, we will have to make do with comparing our protagonist to Auric Goldfinger and a host of other screen despots and blackguards, who wreak international havoc and destroy hundreds of thousands of lives all for the purpose of obtaining riches that, being millionaires, they not only don’t need, but which are hardly worth the chaos and bloodletting in the first place.
