Wolff: Libby Done In by "Libby's very Scooterness"



(image via tnr)

Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff, who, at this late date, still hasn't reclaimed his gilded perch at Table 5 at Michael's, weighs in on the Libby trial. This is the same Michael Wolff who never reads new York Magazine because ... it doesn't exist in his universe (An expressive silence).

How positively "Zen" (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment). Well, if not Zen, then "Luntz" -- Frank Luntz, that is. Frank Luntz is, of course, The Grand Visier of Republican Wigensteinian Language Games (Said with an air of restrained laughter). One can almost see Luntz's narrative fingerprints all over Wolff's piece about The Republican brand, an MBA President, and a CEO Vice. From Vanity Fair:

"Around the corner from the trial of Scooter Libby, during a late-afternoon break, Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, was telling me that the Republican Party is kaput. 'The brand isn't just sick—it's dead. The G.O.P. is cracking up.' (Luntz is a marketer marketing his new book, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear, about political marketing, and knows he needs a compelling message. We have a brief discussion about whether his thesis about the end of the Republicans might get him some publicity.) The Bush administration, in other words, could well have brought one of the greatest marketing and P.R. success stories of the modern era—the rise of conservatism and the Republican Party—to an end.

"... (The Republican Party) is corporate and all so terribly top-down. Libby's involvement in the mess gets going because the vice president reacts in classic C.E.O. fashion to the message going awry: somehow—confoundingly, annoyingly—he's gotten linked to Wilson's African trip. It's a C.E.O. thing to focus both on himself and on a tangential (albeit irksome) detail—it's part and parcel of obsessiveness, of perfectionism, of having control issues—and to demand that the minions fix it (with his penknife, Cheney cuts out articles that annoy him and saves them).

"The vice president is grumpy about the irony: it suddenly seems he's the one—him, the war's greatest sponsor—who clumsily sent Joe Wilson to Niger and got the W.M.D. thing turned on its head. Cheney doesn't want to be a joke, doesn't want to be made fun of—doesn't want to lose his dignity. Finding himself linked to Joe Wilson's trip seems similar, in a way, to his having a pregnant lesbian daughter (he responds to being linked to Wilson's trip the same way he later responds to CNN's Wolf Blitzer's bringing up the awkward pregnancy—he growls and swats it).

"This is what Libby is dealing with."

(Vanity fair)