Last week’s election results (dismal for them) notwithstanding, Democrats still have George W. Bush to kick around. There’s a fair amount of local buzz about Fair Game, the new movie starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame — the couple who became pawns in some high-stakes political intrigue related to the former president’s invasion of Iraq.
Wilson, it will be remembered, is the former ambassador who was deputized to make a fact-finding trip to Niger to check out reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to purchase yellowcake uranium from that African nation. He found no such evidence and, when the administration went ahead anyhow and cited the uranium claim as part of its buildup for the invasion, Wilson wrote a debunking op-ed for the New York Times.
Not long thereafter, leaks appeared in the media blowing Plame’s cover as a CIA agent — am act of apparent retribution which resulted in the trial and conviction of Scooter Libby, a ranking aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney.
Fair Game recounts these events, and Participant Media, which co-hosted with the White House the recent “START Now Summit: Women Leaders for Nuclear Security,” scheduled a free screening of the film for 7:30 p.m., Thursday, November 11 at the Cordova Malco Theater. Germantown’s Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, who participated in the summit, was helping to organize local attendance, with registration and more information available at tnfairgame.eventbrite.com.
