It wasn’t exactly a swearing-in, but Senate president Dick
Cheney directed a memorable oath at Democratic subaltern Pat Leahy
anyway. “Take good care of yourself,” Cheney told him, man to man,
which everyone in the press, in reports based entirely on hearsay,
turned into an expletive undeleted. For the first time in its PG
history, the Washington Post proudly published the full
F-word attributed to Cheney by discredited, politically motivated
sources. Welcome to the major leagues!
The question now is what is to be done with Dick Cheney? Does he
resign from his post? Does he lose his deferments? Should there be
hearings? Or is John McCain already ready to assume his spot?
There’s an old salt who for all practical purposes invented Senate
locker room expressions, many of them stolen from Lyndon Johnson.
Our own view is that Veep Cheney was asking for tongue trouble when
he agreed to share a pew with Hillary Clinton at the Reagan
funeral. Welcome to the big time!
Naturally, no one comes bigger than two-timing president Bill
Clinton, author of a tome only he could swallow in one bite. He
would deny having such ability, which may be true now that he has
decided to live longer by watching what he eats. This may explain
his difficulty in swallowing the uninviting reviews his memoir is
receiving, not to mention the occasional question from a BBC
interviewer. Let’s hope Bill rethinks his current eating habits,
lest he lose whatever substance he once carried. How interesting
that the name of his memoir echoes a Chekhov short story entitled
“My Life: The Story of a Provincial.” It was going to be either
that or “The Possessed.”
John Fitzgerald Kerry had a busy week, flying in to cast a
politically motivated vote only to learn that the vote had been
postponed for patriotic reasons. Perhaps what people mistook as a
comment by Dick Cheney were echoes of Kerry’s reaction in the
Senate chamber on learning patriotism had won the upper hand. To be
sure, Kerry isn’t always successful in getting his points across.
He remains a great communion taker, not a great communicator.
But Kerry did clinch the presidency when Lee Iacocca came out to
endorse him. Immortalized as “The Great Lasagna” back when ethnic
slurs were on the menu, Iacocca resolved one mystery with his
surprise move: there’s no longer any need to guess who the K-Car
was named after. Nice to see Lee still active in the lemon
business.
A different ethnic slurring is at work in the case of deputy
defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Here hard left Democrats are
leading the way, as we saw when the likes of Tom Daschle, Terry
McAuliffe, Max Baucus, Bob Graham, and Tom Harkin joined 800 other
Reds to give the lovely Michael Moore a standing salute at the
Washington premier of “FH 911” and to laugh uproariously at a clip
of Wolfowitz wetting his comb in an old east European way to get
his hair to stay down. The hairpiece crowd has a problem with
that.
Chickenhawk journalists have grievances of their own regarding
Wolfowitz. Howard Kurtz and Maureen Dowd in particular, who have
never served a day in Iraq, demanded Wolfowitz’s head for
criticizing the quality of reporting coming out of Iraq, especially
by reporters too nervous to get out of Baghdad. Yet neither Kurtz
nor Dowd volunteered to try their hand in harm’s way, which would
have been the best method to prove Wolfowitz wrong. Wolfowitz,
incidentally, made his remarks while on the move in Iraq
himself.
Have we forgotten to mention Al Gore? Good. He means well, just
doesn’t know how to get his message across. We hear he needs a
consolation prize. An EOW pin will have to do. He intended to get
to the Moore premier, though try as he might he couldn’t get the
hair to stick over his bald spot. Next time he should use a fire
hose, the same one applied to Moore in the shower, not so much to
clean up Moore as to clean up after him. As Al knows as well as
anyone, environmental standards must be maintained.
