Ron Charles Admits It's 'Stale,' But WashPost Critic Hails Liberal Democrat's Cheney-Mocking Novel

December 28th, 2014 2:35 PM

The Washington Post never, ever tires of mocking Dick Cheney. They proved it again on Wednesday, when book editor Ron Charles oozed praise over a neocon-bashing novel by liberal Congressman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.). The headline on the front page of the Style section was “Spirited, funny satire of war on terror’s effect on civil rights.”

Charles said “The bar is low for a novel by a member of Congress. One feels grateful if the book doesn’t commit a crime or humiliate itself in a public restroom.” So Israel created  “an unexpected delight.”

So it’s an unexpected delight to find “The Global War on Morris,” a political satire by Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), so spirited and funny. Yes, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Israel presided over his party’s drubbing last month, but if the new Republican majority dismantles Obamacare, at least he can remind us that laughter is the best medicine.

Israel’s debut novel lambastes the George W. Bush administration for perverting the battle against terrorism into an elaborate assault on civil rights here at home. In the pages of “The Global War on Morris,” the president himself stays mostly offstage — not so much innocent as wholly controlled by the three stooges of political evil: Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and especially Dick Cheney.

These are, admittedly, soft, stale targets for a salvo of precision-guided gags. The administration that led us into a war “to rid this world of evil,” that torturously disavowed torture, that turned a desert upside-down to find weapons of mass disappearance — that administration didn’t leave much on the table for a satirist to exaggerate. (Yes, Sen.- Edward M. Kennedy really was flagged at several airports as a possible terrorist.) Has any political cartoon ever captured the whole spectrum of Cheney’s sneer? What parody could possibly embellish Rove’s paranoia? What farce could ever hyperbolize Libby’s cynicism? But writing in the full-tilt style of Carl Hiaasen, Israel takes on those challenges, skewering his way through one gaffe after another in the fight against domestic terrorism.

Imagine “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” with a soupcon of al-Qaeda.

Charles knows about the “soft, stale targets,” but liberals never find it stale, like writing a novel now about Clinton’s womanizing. He doesn’t care if the average Republican would find this novel amusing. Liberals like it, he likes it. That’s all. Cheney “snickers at constitutional rights,” ha ha:

There, at the center of a network of sycophants, Cheney stirs the cauldron of our nation’s anxieties about “terrorists, jihadists, liberals.” He whines about how soft Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone, snickers at constitutional rights and calculates how best to manipulate the terror alert system before the Republican convention. “Don’t raise it too high,” Rove chimes in. “Has to be credible. Can’t look political.”

...In the event of a nuclear attack, the vice president would stay safe in COG, “riding out the survival of the United States,” taking comfort in “the entire works of Rush Limbaugh..., his favorite hunting rifle, and a list of major Republican National Committee donors who would be prioritized in any search and rescue operations as the nation emerged from its apocalypse.”

“What gives the novel some pointed currency” according to the Post is the mockery of a super-secret surveillance project of “maniacal ambition” called NICK – “the Network Centric Total Information Collection, Integration, Synthesis, Assessment, Dissemination, and Deployment System.” Its funded by squeezing funds from other innocuous government agencies. To NICK, “everyone was either suspicious or a suspect, a patriot or a Democrat.”

The congressman's plot is all about how NICK focuses in on an innocent pharmaceutical sales rep named Morris Feldstein:

In a perfect storm of ineptitude, fervency and technophilia, Cheney and a vast right-wing conspiracy of competing agencies become convinced that plain-vanilla Morris is actually a diabolical money man for a group of Islamic terrorists working minimum-wage jobs around the Paradise Hotel in Boca Raton, Fla. (Yes, they’ve finally gotten to paradise, but where are their virgins?) Hassan, the head terrorist, is the towel attendant at the pool, battling the infidels all day: “He took an oath to destroy them, to annihilate them, to consume them in a wrathful, unmerciful, apocalyptic fireball. But until then, he had to keep them dry.”

It’s so funny we forgot to laugh. But Charles thinks this should somehow worry Cheney: