Attention, all right-wing princesses living the dream: If you lie down with dogs, be prepared to get up with fleas

It's a sad tale that our defrocked fairy princess has to tell, a story of right-wing Beltway sleazebags devouring one of their own -- a story that will thrill you and chill you and almost certainly make you want to puke.

by Ken

You know how the invaluable News Hounds site has as its motto, "We watch FOX so you don't have to"? Well, I'm here today to cover for those of you who noticed that in Monday's Washington Post "Handsome Howie" Kurtz spilled gazillions of words on poor Emily Miller, who set her sights on being a right-wing Beltway power player and then, when things kind of went wrong for her, found herself being eaten alive by her own kind. Come on, admit it: You saw that piece, and at just that moment you remembered that you've been meaning to clean out the garage for the last four years, or that you have some really important paint to watch dry.

Well, I took one for the team. I read the whole damned thing, top to bottom. That's my normal full year's ration of Handsome Howie in a single day. It's such a moving tale that I'll be damned if by the end I didn't just want to puke my guts out.

Now you may not remember our Emily by name. But think back to the glory days of the last Republican-controlled Congress, when the Republicrooks were frantically stealing everything in sight, when their greed got so out of control that even their own party's prosecutors couldn't look the other way, and it looked like at least 20 or 30 of them were headed for the pokey. (Some of the Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys who lost their jobs in Karl Rove's DoJ purge apparently made the mistake of getting too close to people who were too powerful or knew too much to be treated like the common criminals they were.)

Perhaps our Emily's head was turned when she entered the D.C. political whirl at such a dizzying height -- flacking for that one-man war against democracy and decency, Tom "The Bugman" DeLay.

Specifically, think back to the spectacular fall of lobbyist-crook Jack Abramoff, which sent waves of panic through so many of the congressional Republicrooks, who were up to the eyeballs in Abramoff payoffs. You may remember that Lucky Jack had a sidekick-in-crime named Michael Scanlon, a charmer who -- at least in the popular folklore -- was ratted out to the feds by the babe he had jilted at the altar.

Yes, that was Emily Miller!


WHAT SHE DID FOR LOVE

Oh Emily, Emily, Emily, didn't your mama warn you about men like Michael Scanlon? (Yes, that's Prince Charming at right.) You know, words of wisdom like how if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas?

In 2002, while Miller was DeLay's press secretary, she got engaged to Michael Scanlon, an athletic, charismatic operative who had also worked for the congressman, then the House majority whip. "It was a bad relationship," Miller says. "It was so tumultuous." But, she says, "he was the first person I ever fell in love with."

Ah yes, love. Love makes us do crazy things, for sure. And unfortunately Emily would have had all too much access to her fairy-tale prince in the Bugman's office. Oh, he didn't work there anymore. He had been the Bugman's communications director but had already moved on to the private sector to cash in on his contacts. He was soon enmeshed in Trader Jack Abramoff's Indian casino swindles. And once he'd set up his own lobbying shop, you figure he spent as much time in the Bugman's office as he did when he worked there.

(Among Prince Michael's claims to semi-fame is an e-mail he wrote to a fellow Bugman staffer during the Clinton impeachment imbroglio: "You kick him until he passes out. Then beat him over the head with a baseball bat, then roll him up in an old rug and throw him off a cliff into the pound surf below!!!!!")

The relationship didn't end well. "The day before her bridal shower, Miller says, Scanlon called off the wedding. They reconciled, Scanlon backed out again, and three weeks later he married a 24-year-old waitress." But our plucky Emily pulled herself together and wangled a job as deputy press secretary to Secretary of State Colin Powell. She seems to have brought to the job the ax-wielding attack mode she learned working for the Bugman. Handsome Howie chronicles the following incident without seeming to grasp the full horror-show magnitude of it:

In the spring of 2004 she was traveling in Jordan with Powell, who was doing a round of pre-taped interviews with the Sunday talk shows. Each network was allotted 10 minutes, but while Powell sweated in the hot Mideast sun, "Meet the Press" was running several minutes long. Exasperated, Miller ordered the audio feed switched to Fox, and the camera panned to a wide shot of trees in front of the Dead Sea. But NBC's audio remained intact.

Tim Russert complained from Washington: "I would hope they would put you back on camera. . . . I think that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate."

As the delay dragged on, Powell ordered: "Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back, please." Powell's image returned to the screen, and Russert asked his last question.

When the traveling party got to Ireland and saw that "Meet the Press" had aired the dispute, Miller burst into tears in front of reporters. "I'm hysterically crying in the airport," says Miller, still insisting that NBC should have edited out those exchanges. "It was just ridiculous. My job is to protect my boss and make him look good."

So in Emily's mind she was just protecting her boss and making him look good? What I see is the old Bugman school of bare-knuckles bullying mixed with that common far-right-wing "I'll show you" offensive defensiveness that always recalls the free-floating paranoid-psychotic rage of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.


Now we all make mistakes, and sometimes they're bloody big ones. Still, in what corner of her bound-for-success right-wing brain did Emily dream she was either protecting her boss or making him look good?

Oh, I imagine she felt good, taking advantage of this opportunity to by God bash the brains out of those Commie liberal media elites by exercising her power to enforce this sacred 10-minute rule. Handsome Howie somehow divines in this incident heightened mortification from the fact that she had once worked at NBC News, as a researcher. (She went on to ABC News and became an associate producer before embracing her outer Bugman.) However, what I see in the way she retells the story to Handsome Howie is that neither at the time nor at any time since has it registered with her that practically speaking what she accomplished was:

(1) to nearly deny Secretary Powell precious Meet the Press face time, in the process --

(2) making her boss look like a jackass and --

(3) pissing off probably the single most influential TV journalist in Washington.

Talk about a day's work! Assuming her job was to undermine the secretary's job effectiveness.

That wasn't the only thing that happened in 2004. With the Abramoff scandal exploding, press reports surfaced of Prince Charming's involvement with him in the casino scams.

The FBI contacted Miller months later and arranged an interview with two young female agents, who questioned her on matters ranging from Scanlon's strange use of different first names to his work for the tribes. Her lawyer had warned her to limit her answers, but Miller says she babbled on after the agents commiserated with her romantic turmoil. The lawyer chided her afterward: "You won't shut up!"

And in the fall of 2005 Scanlon was indicted. Characterful chap that he is, he couldn't wait to spill his guts. ("Scanlon pleaded guilty three days later, offering to pay nearly $20 million in restitution and help with prosecutors in the case. Scanlon hasn't been sentenced; his lawyer, Stephen Braga, says Scanlon is 'still cooperating with the Justice Department.'" Do you get the feeling that the prince has been stringing those prosecutors along, telling them just enough to keep his sorry ass out of jail?)

It wasn't till 2006, though, that Emily's world really came apart, when a "carefully worded" front-page story in the Wall Street Journal technically correctly reported her role in the investigation of Scanlon. ("'The story makes clear that prosecutors came to her, not the other way around,' says Jerry Seib, the Journal's executive Washington editor.") However, the story ran under the head: "Behind Unraveling of DeLay's Team, a Jilted Fiancee."

Which has become Emily's permanent identity: the jilted fiancee who got her revenge by bringing down Michael Scanlon and Jack Abramoff and who knows who else? I have no difficulty believing that she has been treated brutally by former friends and associates. Even with Handsome Howie as her champion, it's not hard to feel sympathy for what she's been put through.

And at the very end of his piece, HH -- after giving us the impression that Emily has no distance whatever from the person she was once upon a time -- gets around to this:

Miller admits her personality wasn't always pretty. The scandal blew up her carefully ordered world, the world of so many drawn to Washington's marble corridors, and she is still picking up the pieces.

"It's forced me to look at what truly matters in life," she says. "I was so ambitious in my 20s and early 30s. I worked all the time. It was all about success and power. Somehow I thought that would make me happy, and make me feel good about myself.

"It's only by losing that -- by not having the title to use at a cocktail party -- that made me realize what matters is your relationships, friendships, community, family, my church. I've definitely developed a sense of empathy and compassion for others who are struggling."

WHEN THE CLOWNS TAKE OVER THE CIRCUS

Unfortunately, the nightmare isn't over for Emily. In some ways it's just beginning. A character named George Hickenlooper is making a movie called Casino Jack. The impression Handsome Howie gives is that it's another in the long line of right-wing media whitewashes, where history is rewritten to conform to wingnut sensibilities. Facts not only don't matter, they're actively scorned. These delicate geniuses have complete knowledge of the truth, because they make it up themselves.

Emily, to her horror, discovered that she has a prominent role in the film. Alas, the "Emily Miller" in the film appears to be a total invention, barely related to her either personally or factually.

While preparing for the part, [actress Rachelle] Lefevre told Gotham magazine, "I bought these intensely spiky Fendi and Christian Dior stilettos. I felt she was a little bit 'vanity first,' and it helped me find her as a character."

Miller felt she was losing custody of her own name. She is known among her friends for her outdated, lackluster wardrobe. "I wear ugly pantsuits and flat shoes," she says. "Now this dimwit Hollywood actress who knows nothing about me is talking about what I would wear."

And it gets worse.

When Miller finally got a copy of the script from a friend, her shock turned to horror. "I'm a bitch, I'm materialistic, I'm bad in bed," she says. There is an early scene -- set in DeLay's office on the night of George W. Bush's first inauguration -- in which she is making out with Scanlon, who introduces her to Abramoff. [Emily has made a point of telling Howie that she has never met Abramoff.] There is a later scene in which she is going through Scanlon's pants pockets and finds a pair of red lace panties from the girlfriend he's seeing on the side. The Miller character marches to the FBI, indicates she has something to report, and drops the panties on the agent's desk. Later, Scanlon tells Abramoff that his now-former fiancee knew all about their fraud scheme and had blown the whistle, prompting the lobbyist to curse Scanlon and lunge after him.

The false narrative had returned, packaged for theatrical release. "It makes me abetting a federal crime," Miller says. She pauses. "I'm getting all worked up again."

For me the one incontestable reward of slogging through Handsome Howie's hurlathon of hubris was filmmaker George Hickenlooper's astonished response to Emily's unhappiness. He fancies himself as -- hold onto your cookies, kids! -- Oliver friggin' Stone! Forget what a dreadful role model Oliver Stone is, being basically a self-absorbed and self-promoting fantasist who takes advantage of question marks and holes in the historical record to weave intriguing but hare-brained fabrications of history. It appears, though, that by comparison with our Mr. Hickenlooper, Oliver Stone is the great social realist Leo Tolstoy and the peerless documentarian Marcel Ophuls rolled into one.

Hickenlooper describes this project to Handsome Howie as "a labor of love," for which he deferred half of his usual salary. (Not "declined," note, just "deferred.")

The "very balanced" movie, he says, is like an Oliver Stone production, "a narrative interpretation of the events that capture the spirit of what happened, based on research. . . . [sic -- don't ask me what these ellipsis dots mean -- Ed.]

"I'm not sure what Emily Miller is complaining about. She comes across as kind of the hero of the movie. She says, 'It's an outrage, they're trying to make a buck on me.' She's trying to build up attention for herself. She's not misrepresented in the film."

Hickenlooper keeps trying to win her over, writing on Miller's Facebook page: "You are terrific in it! And you look gorgeous!"

But how, in what he admits is a partly fictional work with consolidated characters, can he use Miller's real name, rather than changing it? "Because our lawyer said we didn't have to," Hickenlooper says.

Are you getting this? He's not sure what Emily Miller is complaining about? You mean, besides the fact that, as she has explained to him over and over, just about everything involving her in the picture is a lie?

None of that matters, apparently. All that matters is what "comes across." Not what happened or didn't, or why, or what any of it, viewed honestly, might mean. And I should note here that I'm always deeply suspicious of people who casually mingle fact and fiction. They're wildly different modes of understanding reality, and the people who mix them so casually usually do so because they don't give a damn about reality.

Remember, though, that the lawyer said it's okay.

That's a pretty plucky lawyer compared with, say, my company's, who is eternally vigilant for anything we print that might possibly subject us to lawsuits. Whereas this guy doesn't even care that a real person's name has been attached to a pack of lies.

Maybe he figures that the very existence of this film with its "Emily Miller" character proves that she's a "public figure" and therefore entitled to no protection against libel except following the famous "actual malice" standard. (He might, in other words, be following in the footsteps of Oliver Stone's lawyers.) Or maybe he reckons that Emily would only make herself look worse by suing -- in effect making sure that anyone who doesn't already know her as "the scorned woman" will?


MICHAEL SCANLON FACTS YOU'RE
RESPONSIBLE FOR ON THE MIDTERM

In addition to his involvement in the Abramoff casino scandal, and the above-quoted e-mail advice on how to deal with a political adversary when you've got him down, there's this nugget reported by Wikipedia:

"In 1993, Scanlon was hired by the American Bar Association as a public relations specialist to help improve the image of the legal profession."

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