Matt Yglesias

Banquo’s Ghosts

Reader F.W. writes to draw my attention to Rich Lowry’s spy thriller Banquo’s Ghosts commenting “apparently he managed to pack every imaginable vapid right-wing cliché into his “forthcoming literary masterpiece”:

Lowry: Here’s the basic plot: Peter Johnson is a left-wing journalist who writes for a New York-based publication called The Crusader. He’s a lush, a cynic, and a little corrupt. But watching the 9/11 attacks from his Brooklyn Heights apartment changes something in him. He begins to have doubts about the “hate America” pieces his editrix, Josephine von Hildebrand, constantly assigns him. Meanwhile, an old forgotten CIA spymaster, Stewart Bancroft (he works under cover of the name Banquo), has an eye on him. Banquo is old school. He’s been marginalized in the new overly bureaucratic, politically correct CIA, as an anachronism who believes in aggressively and imaginatively taking the fight to the enemy. He concludes that the best possible man to send to kill Iran’s top nuclear scientist is the one no one would suspect–the unreliable, famously America-hating Peter Johnson. And then, as they say, mayhem ensues.

In Lowry’s defense, the idea of Christopher Hitchens reacting to 9/11 not by abandoning his Nation column in favor of a Slate column, but instead by becoming an assassin is pretty amusing.

Also there are tons and tons of vapid right-wing clichés that aren’t involved in this plot sketch. My recollection of the Tom Clancy book in which Jack Ryan becomes President is that not only does he do a bunch of right-wing national security stuff, but he also implements common sense domestic policy solutions like a flat tax.