Casting call: Who should portray Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame?

In case you haven’t heard, and there’s a good chance you haven’t, what with all the obnoxious ongoing leftoid celebrations over the Libby verdict, Warner Brothers is planning on making a movie about the pLamegate ‘scandal’. Via Hollywood Today:

WB secured the life rights of Wilson and Plame so that their story, so far starring Alec Baldwin, will be told even if they don’t get permission from the CIA to use Plame’s memoir, “Fair Game.” Plame made a publishing deal in the $2.5 million range last year, and Simon & Schuster is expected to publish late this year. The film is co-production between Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman (“A Beautiful Mind” The DaVinci Code”) and Jerry Zucker (the “Aiplane” and “Naked Gun” franchises) and Janet Zucker.

I wonder if Alec Baldwin will the actor portraying Joe Wilson? I think he, with his massive ego which closely resembles Wilson’s, might make a perfect fit for that role. They also share a mutual hatred of Dick Cheney, although Baldwin’s hatred has been expressed in a, shall we say ‘different’ way.

More on the movie, via Variety, the magazine where Joe and Val first appeared together post-‘outing’:

The film is a co-production between Weed Road’s Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker of Zucker Productions.

Jez and John Butterworth are writing the screenplay.

WB has secured the life rights of Plame and Wilson. Studio also will use Plame’s memoir, “Fair Game,” if the CIA permits her to publish it. Plame made a reported publishing deal in the $2.5 million range last year, and Simon & Schuster is expected to publish late this year. While it would be ironic for Plame’s story to be illegally leaked by the White House, only to have another government branch deny her the right to tell it herself, the CIA has the latitude to silence Plame.

Here’s more on that book (and yes, I’m ignoring the obvious bias in the Variety reporting for the time being).

Continuing:

Jerry and Janet Zucker, who got to know Plame and Wilson because all four are involved in stem cell politics, said that the fate of the book won’t determine the fate of the film.

“Almost everything that we need for the movie is available from print outlets, and obviously we haven’t read the book yet because it hasn’t been approved by the CIA,” Jerry Zucker said. “Valerie has been incredibly careful with what she tells us, it’s almost like she is still working for the CIA. The biggest element of the movie to us is the story of two people who spent their lives in service of their government, and were then betrayed by that government.”

Well, gee, now isn’t THAT surprising? The movie will be told as though Joe and Val were ‘innocent victims’ of some massive WH attempt to ‘hurt Joe’ by ‘outting’ his wife, a woman who we STILL don’t know whether or not was ‘covert.’ That said, we may very well find out soon as she will be testifying next week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on ‘how the WH dealt with her identity.’ Liberal hero Patrick Fitzgerald has been invited to the March 16th hearing but has not yet answered one way or the other about whether he will attend.

Oh, the drama of it all.

Joe and ValAnyway, who do you think would best fit the roles of Joe Wilson and Valerie “Flame” Plame? Although Baldwin might be cast at the moment, with everything else in Hollywood, I doubt that’s set in stone. Hmm. Speaking of stone, what about Sharon Stone in the role of Valerie Plame? They kind of favor each other, don’t they? The NYT reports that there is ‘talk’ of Nicole Kidman or Diane Lane portraying her. I don’t see the resemblance, but whatever.

In other Wilson/Plame news, per that NYT link, Mr. and Mrs. Innocent are moving soon to Santa Fe, NM. Rumor has it that the only stipulation Joe Wilson had was to make sure the house was close to or had a cocktail bar.

As a fresher on Joe Wilson’s credibility, let’s not forget that Joe Wilson – for a time – was touting that Hussein was extremely dangerous and he painted his ‘objections’ to the war in the following manner (via an October 2002 editorial he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News – emphasis added):

If history is any guide, “regime change” as a rationale for military action will ensure that Saddam will use every weapon in his arsenal to defend himself. You need look no further for evidence than his use of chemical weapons to repel Iranian invaders during the IranΓ’β‚¬β€œIraq war. As the just-released cia report suggests, when cornered, Saddam is very likely to fight dirty. [Note: This article was written after Joe’s infamous trip to Niger. –ST]

[…]

So the question remains: Can we disarm Saddam this time without risking a chemical attack or a broader regional war that threatens our allies?

[…]

One of the strongest arguments for a militarily supported inspection plan is that it doesn’t threaten Saddam with extinction, a threat that could push him to fight back with the very weapons we’re seeking to destroy. If disarmament is the goal, Saddam can be made to understand that only his arsenal is at stake, not his survival.

Our message to Saddam can be simple: “You are going to lose your weapons-of-mass-destruction capability either through the inspections or through a sustained cruise-missile assault on the 700 suspicious sites the United Nations has already identified. If you rebuild them, we will attack again. And if you use weapons of mass destruction or attack another country in the region, we will destroy you and your regime.” The decision to live or die then becomes his to make.

So he knew he was a threat – a big one – but he didn’t want us to attack. Could this be the real reason why? :

To understand why Wilson was working overtime to keep Saddam on the job is to understand that Saddam did indeed have something to hide. Although the evidence strongly suggests that Saddam was able to move most of his WMDs out of country with Russian help, he did not move them all.

A few weeks back I received an e-mail from a scientist affiliated with a major university’s nuclear program. In the e-mail, he casually referred to the “1.77 tons of enriched uranium” the U.S. found in Iraq.

More than a little skeptical, I e-mailed the scientist back, “Tell me how we know about the 1.77 tons.” He referred me to a fascinating article from BBC News online dated July 7, 2004.

Titled “U.S. reveals Iraq nuclear operation,” the article details how 20 experts from the U.S. Energy Department’s secret laboratories packaged and removed 1.77 tons of enriched uranium and then flew the material out of Iraq aboard a military plane.

The article quotes a smiling Spencer Abraham, secretary of energy, saying, “This operation was a major achievement.” And just as suddenly as the story appeared, it disappeared. Not a word was heard of it from the major networks. The only American media to follow up on it was WorldNetDaily.

This is exactly the kind of story that the major media do not want to disseminate. They much prefer the Wilson storyline, however absurd on the face of it, that Bush lied us into war with manufactured stories of WMDs that never existed.

The question remains, though, why did the administration cooperate in spiking the story? “My feeling is that Abraham didn’t get the memo,” writes my scientist contact. “He opened his mouth and then everybody scrambled to have him never do it again.”

The scientist speculates that Abraham may not have understood what the American forces had discovered. “He made enriched-u look like dirty bomb material, and that’s that,” adds the scientist. “But that isn’t that.”

“Enriched uranium = nuclear weapons,” the scientist continues. He argues that the administration prefers that the American people remain ignorant on the subject, possibly to avoid panic.

“‘Enriched uranium’ means nothing to them. But it’s everything. A machinist, a physicist and plastic explosive are all you need to make a Hiroshima-sized bang.”

There is a second reason for discretion, namely that this material was not manufactured by Saddam. “I think that the French gave Saddam the enriched-u,” observes the scientist, “and once Saddam decided to quit fighting Iran and start supporting Abu Nidal in earnest, we decided ‘enough of that.'”

“Knowing the French,” he adds, “they’d demand their hooch back after starting all the trouble with it.”

The French connection almost assuredly got Joseph Wilson involved in this story in the first place. In 2002, he worked as an international consultant and had a long and deep involvement with French interests, mining interests in particular. Plame herself boasted of her husband’s numerous “French contacts.”

To be sure, the French government and hundreds of its key industries wanted to keep Saddam in power. Saddam had long been among the very best customers of its defense industry.

Along with the Russians, the French were also the primary beneficiaries of the shamefully corrupt United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

Even if Wilson had no involvement with the ill-concealed scandal, he had to know how Saddam’s continued reign benefited his clients and potential clients. Why else would a Washington-based consultant write an op-ed for a San Jose newspaper?

One of the major media’s grubby little secrets is that many of their op-eds are written for hire by individuals whose primary goal is to advance their client’s interests. Given Wilson’s humble stature in October 2002, San Jose was likely the best placement he could get. That would change. Within a year, the newly famous Wilson would be writing op-eds for the New York Times.

Interesting, eh? Here’s more:

Indeed, Wilson’s public relations work on behalf of his clients and allies deserves its own Harvard case study. Consider what is known beyond doubt:

–Wilson finessed at least two all-expense paid trips to Niger from the CIA.

–He used his newfound authority as a weapons inspector to argue publicly against a war that would harm his clients’ interests.

–Initially, he waged the argument that Saddam had to remain in power lest he use his arsenal of WMDs against American troops.

–When the forged documents were exposed, he insinuated to at least three different publications that he was the first one to debunk the forgeries.

–He used his CIA operative wife to enhance his credibility with the first of those reporters, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, despite the risk to her career in so doing.

–Once his wife was exposed, and his own fame heightened as a consequence, he used his visibility to argue that the French ought to be cut in on Iraq reconstruction contracts.

–He used his celebrity to repeat the canard that there never had been any WMDs and that the Bush administration lied about them to seduce the nation into war. This, too, had the effect of making his “French contacts” seems less immoral and more worthy of the spoils and his Democratic clients more likely to regain the Congress and the presidency.

Sheesh! Wilson’s web of deceit is tangled more than I had previously thought. This is the same liar who wrote “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity” and who had a website with the URL RestoreHonesty.com (which initially was his website – paid for by the Kerry campaign, and after a time when you clicked on the link it forwarded you to Kerry’s campaign website, now it’s a dead site taking you to a page about pharmaceuticals). His serial dishonesty, in the face of trying to pass himself off as the one truthful man in a sea of the untruthful, cannot be emphasized enough.

Yet he – and his wife – will be portrayed as ‘innocent victims’ just minding their own business in an upcoming movie about their ‘story.’

Amazing.

Related: ST reader Dana Pico thinks he knows the answer as to why the Washington Post saw through Joe Wilson while the NY didn’t.

Update: Tom Maguire has more on that scheduled pLamegate hearing.

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