George Bush’s White House was straight out of Hollywood

It’s the very end of George W. Bush’s second presidential term, and Dick Cheney comes to see him in the White House to talk pardons.

It’s the very end of George W. Bush’s second presidential term, and Dick Cheney comes to see him in the White House to talk pardons. Specifically, Cheney wants a pardon for Scooter Libby, a man notorious not, as you might expect, for existing under his own porn star name (it’s a game; you take the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name and put them together — trust me, it’s hilarious), but for perjuring himself in the byzantine court case resulting from the outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent (whose own name might also sound like the name of a porn star, although not one created by the game above).

It’s there, in the ex-president’s new memoirs. Dick Cheney (once you start looking, these names are everywhere) wants a pardon for Libby, but George Bush (see?) doesn’t feel inclined. Cheney is distraught. ‘I can’t believe you’re going to leave a soldier on the battlefield,’ he says. ‘The comment stung,’ says Bush. Clearly, our lips are supposed to tremble. But reading it, surely, one can only think… what are these people on?

Hollywood, that’s what. Grade A, and mainlined into the veins. It’s Saving Private Libby, and Bush has bottled it. Take another example, in the interview Bush gave this week to James Harding, the editor of the Times. Did Bush, asks Harding, authorise the use of waterboarding on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind? ‘Damn right!’ says Bush. He uses the same phrase in the memoirs themselves. It’s pure Jack Nicholson, in A Few Good Men. ‘Did you order the code red?’ demands Tom Cruise, as a military lawyer, trying to get to the bottom of the abuse of a military cadet.