In The Coup, I described the people Vice President Godwin Pope saw gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives as he sat on the dais awaiting the president’s State of the Union address: “`On the right, the guardians, our military chefs, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not our most valiant warriors, mind you, or our bravest, or our most most bloody-minded, or our most efficiently lethal, but six professionally accomplished, ribbon-bedecked commanders who have learned, through decades of bureaucratic maneuvers, that the answer to every military question, whether it’s about money, time, firepower, or troops, is “We need more.”’

In Obama’s Wars, Woodward writes “From the beginning of the review, it irked Obama that [General] Petraeus, [Admiral] Mullen and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, had been out campaigning for more troops on top of the 21,000 that Obama had approved shortly after taking office. In September 2009, Petraeus called a Washington Post columnist to say that the war would be unsuccessful if the president held back on troops. Later that month, Mullen repeated much the same sentiment in Senate testimony, and in October, McChrystal asserted in a speech in London that a scaled-back effort against Afghan terrorists would not work. . . .The only distinctly new alternative offered to Obama came from outside the military hierarchy. Vice President Biden had long and loudly argued against the military’s 40,000-troop request. He worked with Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to develop a “hybrid option” – combining elements of other plans – that called for only 20,000 additional troops. It would have a more limited mission of hunting down the Taliban insurgents and training the Afghan police and army to take over. When Mullen learned of the hybrid option, he didn’t want to take it to Obama. “We’re not providing that,” he told Cartwright.

Obama should have read my book.

“This trope relies heavily on Flaw Exploitation manipulating, although the term `flaw’ is used very loosely here. Sometimes the flaw is that the villains are so predictable that they’ll take the first chance they have to do something mean and underhanded. Other times, the flaw is that the heroes are so heroic that they’ll act for the greater good without even thinking about it. A particularly Genre Savvy person will recognize the fact that heroes always win — and design a plan based on the assumption that they will succeed. . . .The key to making a Batman Gambit work is by carefully guiding and manipulating the motivations of those involved, so that the `obvious’ course of action to them is to do what will make the gambit work and it never occurs to them to do things that would ruin the gambit. Because of the presence of this obvious failure mode, anyone who tries to pull off a Batman Gambit and fails often just ends up looking like a fool. In short, if you can say `but what if he does this?’ and that will mess up everything, then it’s a Batman Gambit.”

Our author goes on to cite characters from various genres who have used the Batman Gambit. In anime, Vegito in Dragon Ball Z, Akiyama Shinichi in Liar Game, and both Marik and Dark Bakura in Yu-Gi-Oh!; in television, The Mission: Impossible team and Doctor Who; in comics, Wolverine in Wolverine: Origins, Victor Von Doom and Lex Luthor pretty much all the time, Batman of course, Captain America in Earth X, Nick Fury in Ultimate Marvel Universe, and both Ava and Senator Roark in Sin City; in films, Palpatine/Sidious in the Star Wars Saga, General Koskov in the Bond film The Living Daylights, Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, Neal McCauley in Heat, Mary Poppins, Jason Bourne, Billy Flynn in Chicago, and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs; and in literature, Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation series, GK Chesterton‘s Father Brown in “The Sins of Prince Saradine”, Sherlock Holmes, Milady de Winter in Alexandre Dumas‘ The Three Musketeers, Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, Artemis Fowl, Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert‘s Dune, Voldemort in both Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chauvelin in The Scarlet Pimpernel, Bram Stoker‘s Dracula, both Gandalf and Sauron in JRR Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings, PG Wodehouse‘s Jeeves, and (Ta-DAA) Godwin Pope in The Coup, in which “a US Vice-President engineers one of the most brilliant government ousters this troper has ever seen. He plays everybody like cards in a deck and does it with such panache that you find yourself cheering for the Magnificent Bastard.”

If you’re not flattered to among such company, check your pulse, because you must be dead. Thank you, oh anonymous wikidian!

I have also just learned that just a few days ago, in what may or may not be a related development, the same line became The Quote of the Day on The Eastside Defender, a website based in Minneapolis that focuses on crime news. Thank you–Twins fans? Squarehead Crimebusters? Land o’ Lakers? Whatever–I’m very flattered.

So I just finished his 2007 novel, The Coup. Unbelievably, the blurbs on the dust jacket and on Jamie’s website get it right — this is a biting, yet all too possible, satire on Washington politics and the power of public perception, and it has not received the attention it deserves.

Imagine a President who is a cross between George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and imagine a Vice President with the smarts and charm of Al Gore and the ruthless tenacity of Dick Cheney, and you would have the Presidential pair in Malanowski’s The Coup. Godwin Pope, the VP, is sick of the President’s good ol’ boy, philandering ways. Almost by accident a plot forms in his mind — a viable way to move Jack Mahone out of the White House so Godwin can slide on in.

The plot is full of wry twists, and Malanowski’s portrait of a conniving, yet thoroughly likable VP is the anchor of the novel. You don’t want to like this bastard, but you do — especially when he falls in love with a journalist, uses her to move his plan forward, yet still quotes Marlowe in a love note: “Come with me and be my love.”

My favorite image: the denouement in the Oval Office. Read it — I won’t spoil it. But the image is rich and precisely perfect. My favorite line: Darkness fell on Washington, and like Dracula’s little children of the night, the pundits came out to feed on the weak and dying.

Under threatening skies in a cozy and picturesque former Hudson River train station, twenty or so lovers of literature (or something) came to see the novelist DeLaune Michel and myself perform in a reading sponsored by the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. The Center’s director, Jerri Lynn Fields, opened the evening with a discussion of the great work the center does, and then brought up Chris Raymond. Chris was an excellent choice to serve as emcee (the program was too brief for him to have been a master of ceremonies, but suitably long for him to called emcee.) Not only is he a fine editor, now with ESPN Books, but he knows both DeLaune and me–he is her neighbor in Irvington, and he and I were colleagues at Esquire (I remember him being a frighteningly energetic tyro.) DeLaune read two beautifully observed passages from her new novel The Safety of Secrets–she is an excellent writer and a most expressive reader, no doubt because she has been an actress– and I chipped in with a piece of The Coup, and then we took questions. “Why are you such a cynic?” asked one gentleman. A cynic? Moi? “Because I was raised right,” I assured him. The rain held off until it was tme to go, and them fell in a furious attack. Driving home through the fields of the Rockefeller properties in Pocantico after the storm had passed, one could still see the lightening exploding in the west, over Rockland County somewhere, backlighting the charcoal clouds that still hung bristling in the sky. Seldom have I seen a sky so dramatic, a memorable end to a fun night. (Above, me, DeLaune, Jerri Lynn and Chris.)

By the way, here is a clip of Delaune acting with Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm in a scene from a TV series called Division Street.

I received a nice note from an artist in California named Lisa Jonte (see http://www.Girlamatic.com, or http://www.never-done.com, or
http://www.Arcanumvisual.com), who was trying to track down an article I wrote called When Disney Ran America, which appeared in the June 1991 issue of Spy. After I sent her a copy, I received a lovely note that read, in part: “Hey there! I got the article yesterday! I must say, it’s aged very well. In fact, I think it’s all the more entertaining for the intervening years. . . . I also finished reading The Coup last night. I’m not normally drawn to political fiction (I find I get enough of that on the news) but your book really did draw me in. If it hadn’t, I might have gotten some work done last night, instead of sitting up and turning pages until 2 am. . . .You actually made Washington and its fictional denizens seems more human, more three dimensional (and in some cases, more sympathetic) than their real-life counterparts ever manage to come across. I’m even more impressed that you could to make me (middle class liberal that I am) give a damn about the life of a self-satisfied trust fund baby. When the time comes to cast the movie, tell them I said George Clooney and Rachel Weisz are the only possible choices for Godwin and Maggie. ”

Thanks, Lisa. Your casting choices are right on.

As most of you who read this blog know, in my novel The Coup, President Mahone is forced to resign when the world learns that he has had an affair with a young woman who is also linked to the head of China’s espionage agency (although, as readers know, much about this relationship has been manipulated by Vice President Pope.) Well, big props to Canada, which has done a terrific job in producing their own version of that scandal. Yesterday, Maxime Bernier, Canada’s Alec Baldwinish Minister for foreign affairs, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had left confidential, NATO-related documents in the apartment of his now ex-girlfriend, Julie Coulliard, who, rather Judith Exnerishly, had previously been romantically linked to members of Canadian motorcycle gangs. Yes, in what is the most fantastic part of this story, it turns out that Quebec has a big problem with outlaw motorcycle gangs who “have long tried to infiltrate politics and the judicial systems,” as the Times reports. In a TV interview, Ms. Couillard acknowledged that beginning in 1993, she had lived for three years with a “well-known crime figure” who connected to the gangs, and was later married to an actual biker gang member. And then, not long after, Monsieur Minister! What brought this couple together? You tell me. (I don’t know if Ms. Coulliard measures up to Maggie Newbold, but she obviously knows how to capture eyeballs.) Was his downfall a set-up? Well, if a boyfriend leaves documents at a girlfriend’s apartment, do you expect her 1.) to give him a call and tell him, or 2.) phone a lawyer for advice? I don’t know if Bernier was manipulated by rival, but something sure smells fishy to me.