Lying Cheating Scum. They’re everywhere. Sitting next to you at work. Laying beside you in bed. Pleading for your vote. Take Denny Best, a funny and charming Washington lobbyist who drinks for a living. He knows lying to your friends, buying people, and cheating on your wife are bad, but drifts toward them anyway.
Denny is assigned to bring down Congressman Mansfield – ambitious, depraved and on the move – running for U.S. Senate and seducing young female staff along the way. In one week during the historic political year of 1994, Denny and Mansfield lock horns, with Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the Congress at stake. The challenge for Denny is immense: How can he take out a corrupt politician without losing his soul?
In the amoral contest between them that’s excused as mere politics, it’s not a matter of who wins or loses. It’s not that simple. They are both lying cheating scum. Are you surprised?
Ed Uravic was a Washington lobbyist. He takes you behind the curtain of political ambition, through the halls of power, into places you suspect exist but will never see, from Capitol Hill back rooms to the murky netherworld of exploitation and lies.
If Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) and Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) wrote a script for the TV show West Wing, you’d have something like Lying Cheating Scum.
