A friend of mine who is more clever by three halves than Cheney,(pronounced Cheee-ney, which sounds more like what the man is, but no one gets right except Chris Matthews on MSNBC) sent me what amounts to a psychological background check of our benighted Vice President. It seems that in Natroma County High School, where my friend also went, the lovely Lynne, whose strong-willed mother carried a deputy badge even though she did only clerical work for sheriff's office, had this tendency to go after girlfriends' boyfriends, baton-twirling her way to the state championship, with what was referred to in the piece from "Truthout.org" as a "Playboy figure"which my friend, who was in high school with them says is an exaggeration-- she wasn't that sexy. But apparently she was to little Dick, who had been a fairly pleasant fellow up to that point, according to friends, which he had then. She took him from her closest friend, Joan Frandsen, became Homecoming Queen, at which point he became her campaign manager for Mustang Queen, another Wyoming honor. Passive and dazzled by her, he followed her urgings, abetted by a scholarship she got him from a rich Casper donor, to Yale where he flunked out.
I have to say now, intruding myself, that I am in a great struggle not to chortle. He floundered at Yale, and eventually flunked out. From the University where 'W' got Cs.
As Cheney himself later explained it, Lynne "made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." So she pushed him along and ruined the world for us all, except for those who have relatives or stock in Halliburton.
He went to Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming, married her and got five draft deferments, the fifth one three months into a pregnancy the fruit of which was their daughter, (that daughter?) born exactly nine months and two days after Selective Service eliminated special protection for childless married men.
I have to interrupt this bloodless(except for other people's) saga to tell you that I had an emergency sushi run yesterday afternoon, where I talked to a man, an Iranian, who now lives in Dubai, and very well, too, I would imagine having heard some stories about Dubai and seen his card. Having just come from reading this piece, I imparted some impressions about Lynne being a strong woman, and the real cojones of the operation. "You think that's why their daughter is a lesbian?" he asked me. (Did you know Lynne once wrote erotic lesbian books? And when Wolf Blitzer tried to talk about that on her interview on CNN she blew him to blitz?)
Anyway, it's all very sad, especially as the authors, one a college professor specializing in the creative process, the other a retired psychotherapist, conclude Bush, like Lynne, offers the role of bully to Cheney's passive. So it's really Bush who's in charge, in spite of all the jokes. Oh, Hurry clock! Tick us alive into better days. And let nothing happen to that failed Wyoming lineman, except, since he's such a fiend for secrecy, that he die by a thousand revelations.
Another one, my life being sweetly serendipitous: when Cheney shot his friend in the face, my Jewru was in Bali. And as his life is more than serendipitous, he was at the time with a co- owner of the ranch where the shooting occured. It turns out the reason it took so long for Cheney to call in about the shooting was not because of his blood alcohol rate(which probably might have high, and so illegal, at least for shooting a buddy, and he had a history of drink as an anxious post-schoolboy) but because he was at the ranch with a woman, the wife of a European ambassador, and had to get her out before Lynne found out.
My friend, whom I believe is the country's greatest libel lawyer, even knowing my history, wants me to do something with the early part of this tale as fiction. Oh, I would, I would, but I doubt I'd be able to afford him to defend me.
As Fitzgerald might have said, the very Republican are different from you and me. Yes, might have answered Hemingway: they have passively aggressive Dicks.
