A scheming vice president of the United States, tired of being #2, sets a devious plan into motion to get rid of the president, making him look like a bumbling idiot. Congress is filled with creatures whose tiny minds stand in inverse proportion to their wide, spreading butts. Journalists are in bed with politicians, literally. Oh, and hookers are everywhere.

But enough about last week’s headlines.

Jamie Malanowski, the managing editor of Playboy, has written his second novel, The Coup (Doubleday), a satirical tour de force of Washington, in which he masterfully rips most of his plot points (see first paragraph) from the contemporary political palette (again, sadly, see first graph).

The names therein have been changed, we presume, to protect the not-so-innocent. But why? At many points during our reading of his 240-page tome, we wished, probably quite naively we admit, that Malanowski had done away with that perfunctory pleasantry. Tell your readers, Jamie, which politician we all know has been having an affair. Use his real name. Highlight the journalist who’s sexed and is still sexing her way to the top of the DC journo-world. Use her real name. Let it all hang out, and face the consequences. Get sued, Jamie. For the sake of humanity, get sued. Forget about selling a book via the traditional route. Burn bridges for the simple sake of telling the truth.

The book is good and will be an especially fun and funny read for those far removed from the insidious world of Beltway politics and journalism. Anyone with a conscience who still chooses to live within the milieu, however, will probably have to stop reading by page 11 to reconsider his or her life’s journey. No doubt, the masochists among us, like Ana Marie Cox, for instance, will get her kicks (and quips) without really examining, or explaining to her readers, why the book “manages to excavate an ugly and hilarious truth about Washington.” Explaining how, after all, is the easy part. The why, perhaps, could get her in trouble.

But Jamie went the traditional route, visiting DC late last week to attend a party hosted by The Washington Monthly in his honor. He saw old pals who’ve published his work; he met young journalists who gushed about Playboy’s articles (hoping all the while to see their bylines in its pages sooner rather than later); yes, he danced within our milieu for a few short hours.

And then he left — leaving us and others like us to ponder the whys of this specific universe, the hub that happens to lead the free world. After the party Big Head DC caught up with Malanowski in an effort to help you, dear readers, to piece together your own whys, whatever they may be:

Rob Capriccioso, Editor, Big Head DC: Did any Washingtonians surprise you at the party?

Jamie Malanowski: I was kind of surprised that Carl Bernstein and Condi Rice came by. I didn’t even know they were dating!

JUST KIDDING!

I was hugely surprised that two veterans of Playboy - a writer named Cynthia Grenier, who interviewed Ingmar Bergman for the magazine in 1964, and Peter Ross Range, one time articles editor - came by to meet me and offer some encouragement. I was both surprised and touched.

RC: Upon this visit, what did you absolutely hate about the city and why?

JM: Hate is such a strong word. When you get to be a certain age, you have to ration your hate. You can’t go spending it willy nilly on traffic and the Red Sox if you expect to have left over for Dick Cheney and the saltiness of everything served at Outback Steakhouses. I guess I hated the price of room service at the Hotel Madison. I had eggs for breakfast, and I’m worried that I have bankrupted Random House.

RC: How did your feelings about Washington’s political culture inspire your writing of The Coup?

JM: There were a number of inspirations that got me to writing The Coup. I first started working on it in 1998, after the Clinton impeachment. Several people maintained that what Tom DeLay and the Republicans were doing amounted to a coup. If so, I thought, it was an awfully inefficient one. Gore would have become president, and with the advantages of incumbency, might have remained president for 10 years. So I began thinking of how a real coup might work.

I also found it interesting that Clinton was caught red-handed lying under oath, and yet the Senate declined to remove him from office. I began to play with the opposite: was there a crime for which there could be no proof that would nonetheless absolutely require the removal of the president?

Beyond that, of course, I was interested in the ways scandals serve the mutual interests of the Political-Media Complex, how scandals are used to drive ratings, fundraising, and issues. It’s pretty ugly. Of course, that’s what makes the book fun!

RC: Ana Marie Cox gave you a pretty nice review. I personally thought your book to be much better than her debut novel effort, Dog Days. What did you think about Dog Days?

JM: She did write a nice review, didn’t she, although it couldn’t hold a candle to the rave that appeared in the Wall Street Journal (Sorry, please excuse the self-serving swerve into book-selling. Remember the great quote from John L. Lewis: “He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooteth.'’

Alas, I never read Dog Days (although I did read her work on Wonkette fairly regularly.) Nor have I read Chris Buckley’s books, nor Kristin Gore’s, nor Lynne Cheney’s. I did read Primary Coors, and thought it precious. I eagerly read the complex behind-the-scenes books by Elizabeth Drew and Bob Woodward. It’s fun to figure out who is giving the shiv to whom. Other Washington literature? I was a big fan of the play, Stuff Happens, by David Hare, although it nagged me that there were some places where he made lines up, and I couldn’t tell where. I was a big fan of The West Wing, although I am immeasurably more cynical about politics than the naively idealistic West Wing. In general, my creative impulses are more stimulated by journalism than by fiction.

RC: When you were at Spy mag, were you at all involved in the decision to run the classic nude pic of Arnold Schwarzenegger? (NSFW image here.)

JM: Involved, yes, but not the prime motivator. If you look at that issue, you’ll see it also contains a feature by Lynda Edwards about the Clarence Thomas hearings, which I commissioned and edited. The piece showed how the Democratic Senators on the committee caved to the Republicans, and that they chose to not call another woman who had experiences similar to Anita Hill’s, whose testimony probably would have torpedoed the nomination. Caviling Democrats, scheming Republicans — that’s what I was spending my time on that month.

RC: Do people talk politics much in the offices of Playboy?

JM: No, not very much. Some more than others. But this is a smart bunch and political literacy here is pretty high. You have to get down to Ron Paul before people don’t recognize the names of the presidential candidates. People know who Wolf Blitzer is. But certainly among the younger staff, the primary topics of conversation seem to involve the categories of wine, women and song. Not in that order.

RC: Why didn’t Playboy get the Senator Vitter sex scoop, rather than Hustler?

JM: We are not a particularly scoop-driven magazine. But if you ask me, the bigger sex-related Washington story that came out in that time frame was Dana Milbank’s piece in the Post about a conservative group on the Hill having Dr. Drew in for a talk about sexual practices and mores. The discussion seems to have been candid, current, and detached from religious/ideological frameworks. Jerry Falwell was probably happy to be dead. The culture wars are ending. The right has lost.

RC: What do you think about Larry Flynt?

JM: He’s an authentic American.

RC: Finally, can you assure us that your number won’t eventually turn up in the “DC Madam’s” phone records?

JM: I can assure you that they are! I phoned her last week to get her list. I don’t think anything will come of it, journalism-wise, but asking for the records seemed the least we could do. And probably will do.