Hollywood Hussein: How the U.S. Really Captured Saddam
by Ken Baker
Category: Fiction

HOLLYWOOD HUSSEIN tells the story of how George W. Bush and his White House advisers secretly employed a celebrity magazine editor and his team of scrappy paparazzi to capture Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003. HOLLYWOOD HUSSEIN features a plot twist so amusingly plausible that it should give readers legitimate cause to doubt whether previously published accounts of Saddam Husseins capture in a spider hole south of Tikrit, Iraq, were true or just a U.S.-manufactured propaganda stunt. The end of the story leaves readers left laughing all the way to the voting booth.Featuring the left-leaning political satire of Our Gang (Philip Roths 1972 comic take on the Nixon White House), HOLLYWOOD HUSSEIN is also a ripped-from-the-headlines political tale in the spirit of Primary Colors. The Bush White House in HOLLYWOOD HUSSEIN is one that uses newsstand sales of weekly celebrity rags rather than opinion polls to gauge public opinion; that is beset by petty personality clashes among advisers; that hires a sexy hotel heiress as its press secretary; that trusts the Hollywood paparazzi more than U.S. special forces; that is run by an ADD-plagued Texan whos more interested in jogging than discussing public policy; and that employs the nations reality-TV craze in its foreign policy efforts. The result is a critically amusing portrait of two of the nations most powerful institutions: the popular media and presidential politics. Told through the first-person accounts of those who conspired to pull off Operation Hollywood, the story is told in the imagined words of a diverse cast of both fictional and real-life characters, including George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and last but not least Saddam Hussein. Most of the events recounted in the book are to have taken place between October 2003 and December 2003. The first-person accounts are presented as having come from transcripts, previously classified documents and firsthand interviews conducted by journalist Ken Baker.