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« Maybe Next Time Tom Cruise Can Deliver the SofU Address
D’Souza: The Tequila Strikes Back! »

Law & Order: Treachery and Dirty Tricks Division

Wow, the Scooter trial has gone all “Law & Order” on us even faster than I thought it would!  As the NY Times headline writer put it, “At the Libby Trial, Hints of Intrigue and Betrayal.” For it seems that Scooter’s lawyers are claiming that “White House aides had sacrificed him to protect Karl Rove” and that said aides “deliberately set  … Mr. Libby up to be a scapegoat.” 

Of course, the defense hasn’t yet explained how these nefarious officials forced Scooter to lie to FBI and DOJ investigators, but I’m sure that will come out in day two or so.

As you may recall, in our L&O scenario, we had the character based on Scooter being shot in the court house before he could testify against Dick Cheney — but with real life giving us such a cracker jack opening scene, our plot seems too tame now.  And, given L&O’s recent penchant for ripping from at least two different headlines for each episode, our story probably isn’t complicated (or lurid) enough to get aired. 

So, your challenge is to come up with your own plot for “Law and Order” — you need to start out with the Plame case and trial of Scooter Libby. but then you need to mix in some other recent news item for that special L&O twist.  Here are a couple of examples.

1.  Scooter/Brittany Spears dropping her baby and later showing off her lack of undies.  Plotline: Somebody leaks the name of an undercover terrorism expert to the press, thus killing Jack Bauer and forcing everyone to sit through 24 hours of Jack’s funeral.  A senior White House Official lies to the intestigators about it, and is prosecuted.  But that case is crowded off the front page when a pop starlet feeds some hungry crocodiles while holding her baby, and accidentally drops it into a croc’s mouth.  And she isn’t wearing any panties. 

In a surprise legal move, Jack McCoy tries the two cases together.  When she takes the stand, the starlet reveals that her baby was fathered by Karl Rove’s, which is why Scooter was sacrificed — he was ordered to leak stuff about Plame and then lie about it to deflect attention from her pregnancy.  She takes a plea deal in exchange for her testimonty that she dropped the child on purpose, at Rove’s command, to get rid of the incriminating child.  The undies were stolen by Russian spies who wanted to bring the affair out into the open, but after one of them was poisoned by a plutonium pellet that the RNC slipped into his tea, the other one agrees to testify in exchange for Judith Regan’s old job at Harper-Collins.

2.  Scooter/ the case of those kidnapped boys found in Missouri, one who had been missing for four years. 

Plotline: During one of his radio segments, an obnoxious news personality based on Bill O’Reilly blows the cover of a CIA employee working in North Korea.  The agent is captured and killed only minutes before she was to bring out Kim’s secret nuclear strategy, so Bill is tried for treason, and executed.  Everybody at the D.A’s office is happy.  Even the defense seems glad.

But wait, there’s more!

It seems that the leak came from the White House, which offers up a senior advisor as a scapegoat.  He stays mum until, in an emotional scene in the last act, he testifies that Karl Rove kidnapped him 30 years ago, and he was not only psychologically unable to escape, he also had to do Karl’s dirty work, because he was so afraid of Karl, who used secret “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing techniques on him.  The advisor claims that Karl is a North Korean mole.  Then Karl takes the stand, and says that he was only following the orders of his secret master, Reverend Moon.  He blurts out that his next assignment was to have been the murder of Tom Cruise for claiming to the new Jesus Christ.  It all ends with the revelation that George W. Bush, like LonelyGirl15, is just an actor following a script.  So, everybody wants their money back, and Jack McCoy files a class action suit on their behalf.

And so on. 

Now, make up your own scenarios.  Here are some recent headlines for you to work with. 

Duke prosecutor accused of hiding DNA evidence
Houston Chronicle - 51 minutes ago
 By JOSEPH NEFF and BENJAMIN NIOLET. RALEIGH, NC – When embattled Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong took his seat at the defense table at the NC State Bar on Wednesday, the role-reversal became complete: The hunter is now the hunted.

Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun
 CBS News - 8 hours ago
(AP) The military’s new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire. The technology is supposed to be harmless – a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

After decades, arrest made in slayings
Houston Chronicle - 34 minutes ago
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS and ALLEN G. BREED. AP. JACKSON, Miss. – For four decades, Thomas Moore dreamed of exacting revenge on the reputed Ku Klux Klansman he believed had kidnapped his younger brother and another teen, beaten them and drowned them in …

Obama Rips Fox News Over Madrassa Story
 Boston Channel.com - 7 hours ago
WASHINGTON — With a staffer declaring, “We will not be swift-boated,” Sen. Barack Obama fought back Wednesday against an allegation that he was educated at a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia.

Panama’s Noriega to be Released from US Prison in September
 Voice of America - 9 hours ago
By Lisa Ferdinando. The defense attorney for Manuel Noriega says the former Panamanian dictator is to be released from a Miami prison in September.

 I bet you can come up with some great plots based on those stories (plus l’affaire Scooter).  Or, you can find your own headlines to rip from.  Just be creative!  Bonus points for killing off Districk Attorney Arthur Branch.

Posted by s.z. on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 3:49 am.

15 Responses to “Law & Order: Treachery and Dirty Tricks Division”

Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun
CBS News – 8 hours ago

So, they’ve developed a peaceful deathray?

(AP) The military’s new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire. The technology is supposed to be harmless

Oh, I think someone needs to ask Crow T Robot how “harmless” that really is, even though it is pretty funny.

Left by maryc on January 25th, 2007

24 hours of Jack Bauer’s funeral? Have mercy.

Left by Serge on January 25th, 2007

Valerie Wilson goes to Aruba to get away from the horror of being outed as a CIA agent. She disappears, and FOX news only mentions it a couple of times…Jack McCoy prosecutes BillO for the murder of Valerie. BillO breaks down on the stand and admits Karl Rove and VP Cheney made him “do it”. But he won’t say what “It” is.

Left by Kathy on January 25th, 2007

The solution to the murder is:
BillO. In the Shower. With the Falafel.

Left by scott on January 25th, 2007

Can the new ray gun be used at the same time as waterboarding? I bet we’re going to find out. This administration is full of sick fucks who’d think that was ultracool.

Left by D. Sidhe on January 25th, 2007

Interior, police car. Back-seat two-shot of cops drinking coffee and discussing upcoming Big Game. “Whaddya you, nuts? He’s gonna throw for 400 yards against the best defense in the NFL?” Reply interrupted by

Radio cackle. Disturbance at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Hey, that’s right around the corner. Hit lights and screamer.

Interior, hotel hallway. Manager explaining something about screams. Cops have manager unlock door, burst in. All quiet, nothing out of place, until they look in bathroom, find young woman hanging from shower-curtain rod. Manager explains they have to make shower fixtures extra strong to avoid lawsuits. Cops simultaneously turn and look at him.

Dum-dum. Titles. Commercial.

Driver’s license says girl was 18 and from Terre Haute, Indiana (it’s always Terre Haute, Indiana). ME says she was manually strangled first, positive for Ecstasy and had sexual intercourse, consensual, shortly before death. Hair found stuck to bottom of her foot sent to lab for DNA test, likely African-American. Grief-stricken Parents had no idea she was in New York, thought she was at school in Chicago. No boyfriends they know of. Certainly not African-American. “She was very busy with her studies”.

College roomate reveals she hung out at Chicago Bombers practices, thinks she had a boyfriend but doesn’t know who. “Great,” says Fontana,”an African-American professional football player. We’ve narrowed it down to 75% of the team.” “Don’t forget the coach,” says Green.

By happy coincidence, Big Game being played at the Meadowlands this year. Interviews with the team turn up nothing. Bombers coach Randall “Jelly” DuPree says everybody made bed check the night of the murder. Lab gets a DNA match–it’s the coach of the opposing team! They’re both African Americans! Things look bad for him when it turns out he had a rape beef in college hushed up by the university. But opposing coach insists he didn’t know the girl, and his whereabouts are accounted for for the entire night in question. Fontana and Green begin to smell a set-up.

Then Van Buren tells them that inexplicably popular cornpone radio personality Hank “Hacksaw” Hawkins (simulcast on MSNBC) has revealed secret details about the case on that morning’s show. Hacksaw won’t reveal his sources, but tells the detectives they should take another look at DuPree. Fontana and Green re-interview the team, break the coach’s alibi, and get him to admit having sex with the girl that night. “But she was alive when I left her.”

Poring over reams of evidence late at night, McCoy realizes that there’s nothing anywhere about DuPree’s football career before college. Checking further he finds that there’s nothing anywhere about DuPree at all before 1978. The next day whoever is his assistant this week gets a visit from an old law school classmate, now working for the Feds, who warns her darkly that her boss ought to drop the investigation of DuPree because of some unspecified federal interest.

Then Hacksaw fails to turn up for his morning show, and he’s fished out of the Hudson. ME Rodgers finds a bus-station locker key hidden in a secret compartment in his oversized belt buckle. Rushing to the station the cops retrieve a folder which proves that DuPree, under the cover of coaching a professional football team, was actually a CIA agent who was involved in shipping uranium to Iraq without Saddam’s knowledge and leaving a trail of obviously phony bills of lading as a casus belli. This is the case that Federal prosecutor Mike Murphy was working on, and he was just about to file charges against Vice-Presidential advisor Frank “Muggles” Henderson. It turns out that the feds had tracked Henderson to the hotel that night, and watched him leave again, right around the time of the murder. McCoy is livid. Murphy says, “Maybe you better calm down, Jack. And maybe you ought to ask your boss what he knows about Hank Hawkins.”

Hawkins turns out to have been a Republican operative with ties to the crooked voting machine company which gamed the election of inexplicably popular conepone Manhattan DA Arthur Branch. Fontana and Green come to arrest him. He asks to be allowed to use the bathroom first. Door closes. Gunshot. “Created by Dick Wolfe” says the graphic, leaving us to wonder until next week whether Riley gets the bonus points.

Left by Doghouse Riley on January 25th, 2007

…Valerie Wilson is found, alive and well, tho incoherent, at a truck stop in Nevada. She claims she was kidnapped by Scientologists who tried to brainwash her into having Tom Cruise’s child. Then she changes her story, says it was Moonies who took her. Or maybe aliens.

Left by Kathy on January 25th, 2007

Kathy writes: “Valerie Wilson goes to Aruba to get away from the horror of being outed as a CIA agent. ”

Close: the Wilsons have moved from Washington to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Left by Chris Vosburg on January 26th, 2007

Kathy writes: “Valerie Wilson is found, alive and well, tho incoherent, at a truck stop in Nevada.”

Warmer.

Left by Chris Vosburg on January 26th, 2007

Military Develops Non-Lethal Ray Gun

I’ve seen enough Looney Tunes to know that targets of this weapon learns to start carrying large mirrors. Acme makes the best ones, I hear.

Left by Chris Vosburg on January 26th, 2007

Careening through the streets of a suburb near the campus of a major university, an attractive slightly overweight Afro American female drives a van mounted with appears to be a satelite dish, chasing a band of underwear clad middleaged white males and one skinny white woman through the early morning hours. Screams of fright and pain come from the pursued as residents stand about in disbelief and amusement. Said 18 year old Riley “NuTop Dawg” Wilkerson,” Like I was comin’ in from this party over across town in the Heights( PeteyWheatstraw Heights) when I hear all this screamin’ and sh…uh stuff so I grabs my piece and my boy Newton ( 19 yr. old Newton ” Lil Cut N’ Slash “Thomas )says “What the F…uh goin’ on ?” and then we sees other folks in the ‘hood comin’outside or lookin’through theys windows up the street at these crazy crackers runnin’ down the street. Me and my boy look at each and we figure let’s jack they … remind them it’s a new day what they grandfolks used to do back in the day ain’t happenin’ now. I notice other fellas thinkin’ likewise even my uncle Clyde comes out with his sawed off callin’ ‘em all kinda cracker bastards and stuff, he used to be in the Black Panthers, when we see the van that’s chasing ‘em. Like it ain’t tryin’to run ‘em over or anything like that,but it’s keepin’ ‘em movin’ ya know? Then we hear this sound like those microwaves be makin’ in the movies when somebody stuffs a monster or somethin’ in one, and the crac… white peoples were screamin’ and jumpin’like theys were in one them Three Stooges movies. Mrs. Dexta is lookin’ at the driver and she recognizes her she goes” Ain’t that Reverend Mosely mannish ass daughter Rachel?” And I kinda remember Rachel ’cause you know back in tenth grade we was kind of tight and all, and we went to the prom party over at Biggy Mitch’s house,and you know things got slippery and wet,if you understand what I’m sayin’ so when they circle the block again I see it’s her so does Newton and his girl April(Jackson 18) who just woke her passed out self up.” The said Rachel Mosely,currently employed as a dancer at the Deep Nastee Club, was hired to provide entertainment at an event held in the Doodie & Woody Shoodie Memorial Science Hall and Jerky Kitchens on the campus of Passiton University where several rightwing commentators debated whether Galileo’s liberal agenda ruined the image of science as a reliable truthfinder “Moses and Jesus didn’t say anything about a round Earth” was their topic. A Drunken insult and ethnic slur caused Rachel who in the vernacular “is two degrees past thick” in a rage found the prototype of the US Army’s Heat Beam Emitter in its camoflage as a cable news truck. Further details are forthcoming.

Left by King Coody on January 26th, 2007

S.Z., how on earth could I compete with yours?!??!

I hardly ever watch L&O anymore, except for SVU (when you’ve got crushes on both of the stars, whaddayagonnado?), so I’m probably too far out of touch with the plot formulae to pull it off anyway.

But as for that “ray gun” — whatever happened to that thing that they tested on the protest crowds in Miami over the FTAA? It was a microwave/subsonic-sound broadcaster, like a remote-microwave broadcaster for commercial radio (MARTI), except that the signal was concentrated, in order to produce heart flutters and possibly even STOPPING the hearts/causing major migraines/possible strokes in MASS GROUPS — how come we haven’t heard about THAT evil-ass weapon in years? Did they give up on it or are they using it and, as usual, denying that it exists?

Left by Anntichrist S. Coulter on January 26th, 2007

the Scooter trial has gone all “Law & Order” on us

Isn’t that one of those shows about heroic government employees protecting the public? Sorry, I’m too old to watch cartoons.

Left by Realist on January 26th, 2007

(Scene: Darkened bedroom in Kennebunkport, late night. Babs and George asleep. Phone rings on night table, Babs answers it, George keeps sleeping.)
BABS:(groggy)Hello?
VOICE: (thick Hispanic accent) I’m out.
BABS: (Annoyed)Who is this?
VOICE: You don’ recognize my voice, huh Babs?
BABS:, I’m sorry, I–
VOICE: You forget all those hot nights out in the hammock in the jungle, while that skeenny husban’ of yours is out doin’ fools errands for the CIA?
BABS: (shaky) Manny, that was a long time ago, it’s high time we both–
MANNY: So you didn’ hear I got out.
BABS: No.
MANNY: I gotta see you again. I spent the whole time theenkin’ bout holding you in my–
BABS: (whispered, angrily) Why on earth would I see you?
MANNY: (softly) Come on, Babs. Nobody ever asked how come you and George had four smart kids and one who’s a fuckeen idiot?
BABS: (near tears) Don’t go digging up–
MANNY: How long are people gonna believe your man set me up just for trying to take back my coke connections from Ollie fuckeen North?
BABS: I can’t–I can’t–
MANNY: Look, I’m just tryin to help you. There’s still one guy connected to the White House who knows about all thees.
BABS: (Dabbing her eyes) Scooter.
MANNY: Damn fuckeen right. Two if you count hees boss, but I got so much sheet on heem that–
BABS: Enough. What do you want from me?
MANNY: (coyly) So you agree we gotta do sometheen. I got a plan, Babs, but I really got to ‘splain eet een person. It’s gonna take both of us to feex. Meet me at the lobster place where we had deener the night our leetle Dubya got hees DUI, tomorrow at nine.
BABS: God, I wish I–
MANNY: Wear something nice.
(Phone goes dead with a loud click.)
GEORGE: (sleepily) Who was that?
BABS: Wrong number.
GEORGE: (rolling over, too soft for Babs to hear) Got that right. (Smiles as he drifts back to sleep.)

TO BE CONTINUED………

Left by trashfire on January 26th, 2007

Yeah, but Realist… Jayne Mansfield’s daughter is PURRRDY. So is the guy, Christopher Meloni.

Hey, a girl needs entertainment, whaddaya gonna do?

Besides, they’re both that “maverick” typecast, as in, they don’t “go by the books” to catch the rapists/child-molesters, etc. — it’s a cute mythology, as far from reality as it may be. After all, if anybody really gave a fuck about kids in this country, instead of just TALKING about kids all of the fucking time, then these lowlifes wouldn’t be out in public as it is.

Left by Anntichrist S. Coulter on January 27th, 2007

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