Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [87]
The LA Times found another icky one. As chair of the Defense Policy Board, Perle had received a classified briefing on Iraq and North Korea. A few days later, Goldman Sachs paid Perle to join a conference call with a select group of investors to tell them how to take advantage of this information. Oddly enough, I knew about this sleazy little arrangement before the Times broke it. A twenty-year-old TeamFranken member, who happens to be the scion of a ridiculously wealthy family, had been invited to be on the call. My TeamFranken member (let’s call him “Horace Rockefeller”) was sworn to secrecy, so I can’t tell you what Perle said. But let’s put it this way—I wouldn’t invest in any real estate investment trusts with property along the Seoul subway line.
So screw Ray Charles! This was my chance to bother Richard Perle. I waited for a lull in the conversation and jumped in. “Mr. Perle, Al Franken.”
He nodded.
“Say, how do I get in on this gravy train?” I asked. “I feel like I’ve missed the boat on this whole war.”
“Invest in my fund,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was serious. “I’ll send you a portfolio.” Like an idiot, I didn’t take him up on it. That would have been juicy reading. Instead, I asked him about his threat to sue journalist Seymour Hersh, who had just exposed one of his shady deals in The New Yorker, for libel. Perle had called Hersh, “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” and then threatened to sue him in Great Britain, where journalists aren’t protected by our silly First Amendment. Weeks had passed without Perle suing, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that Perle had been bluffing just to save face while the story was big.
“Why don’t you sue him here?” I suggested snarkily. “That’d really show everyone how strong your case is and how reckless Hersh had been.” See, this is why I wouldn’t make a good journalist. Here I could have gotten the portfolio for Perle’s fund, and instead I had to go one step too far and piss the guy off.
Speaking of pissing off a neo-con: Later, at the after-party given by Bloomberg News, I went up to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense and the architect of the Bush preemption doctrine. “Hi, Dr. Wolfowitz. Hey, the Clinton military did a great job in Iraq, didn’t it?”
He looked at me for a couple seconds, then said, “Fuck you.”
Which I thought was funny. I think he was “kidding on the square,” a phrase I hope will catch on. It means kidding, but also really meaning it. People do it all the time. “Kidding on the square.” If this book does two things, I want it to get “kidding on the square” into the lexicon, and I want it to get Bush out of the White House.
Then Wolfowitz and I had a short argument. “The Clinton military never could have done this war,” he said.
“Well, maybe they wouldn’t have, but they could have.”
This is a completely different military, he said. Then he talked about the influx of money since Bush’s defense budget kicked in. (It kicked in during October 2002.)
I said, “Let me ask you. Did you guys actually make any of the machines that have been used in Iraq?”
That got him all pissed off again. So he got into how they’ve reorganized the military, and technical arguments on how they’ve changed the command structure. I mean, he is the deputy secretary of defense, and I have to admit he lost me.
But, of course, he was wrong. I was right. I’ll get into all of this in a later chapter, entitled “Yeah? Well, Fuck You.” Actually, it’s called, “Bush Can’t Lose with Clinton’s Military,” and after you read it, I think you’ll agree that Bill Clinton remains the greatest president of the twenty-first century.
As exciting as my little Noël Coward tête-à-tête was with Wolfowitz, I had my most interesting and perhaps most significant conversation that night with Commerce Secretary Don Evans. Evans is among Bush’s closest friends and was featured