Once a Dick, Always a Dick

In the news, today:

Cheney, Needling Biden, Defends Bush’s Record on Executive Power
New York Times - 3 hours ago
By RACHEL L. SWARNS WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday vigorously defended the White House’s use of broad executive powers during the last eight years, saying he believed that historians would ultimately look favorably on the Bush …

Ahh, but they’re being far too kind:

Ryan Powers / Think Progress:

Cheney: I told Leahy to ‘f*ck’ himself because ‘I thought he merited it.’ —  This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney about his now infamous June 2004 exchange with Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), when he told Leahy to “f*ck yourself.”

I’m not going to talk about the miscreant veep’s behavior today. Andrew Sullivan has as good a take on the debacle on Faux Nooz as anybody.

But, since it IS his swan song, I might as well reprint this piece from 2006, which the vast majority of my readers haven’t seen. From Skiing Uphill, the original incarnation of this blog (in keeping with the spirit of the Holidays), the story of when Dick Cheney screamed at my brother and I, and then my father over, well, none of his business :

Sunday, February 19, 2006

WHILE WE APPRECIATE THE ‘SHOWER,’ WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE PLEASE *PLEASE* TURN OFF THE FAN??!?!
or, THE PIE PILES HIGHER

All right. I do not hold that Cheney was necessarily having a little assignation when he had his little accident. But I admit that I first suggested the possibility on Monday, the thirteenth. The various “pundits” of the internet got on the story late Wednesday and early Thursday. By that time I was no longer so sure.

But I had formed the distinct impression that I need to change the Skiing Uphill motto from “tomorrow’s news today” (a reference to the fact that, pulling news stories from around the world, I often publish, say, a Sydney, Australia story from “tomorrow” in today’s column) to “the day AFTER tomorrow’s news today.”

This happened with a “parody” I posted to the Stephanie Miller Show last fall. On the day it was posted, suddenly a ‘brilliant’ parody appeared in Los Angeles, was linked and noted by the LA WEEKLY, referenced on “The Daily Kos” etcetera. My piece? A parody of a vodka ad, with Bush superimposed inside a white on black Absolut vodka bottle. My tag? “Absolut Idiot” (A reference to the then-current NATIONAL ENQUIRER stories that Bush was hitting the bottle in Crawford).

The “brilliant” piece? Pictures of the various Republican scandalous: Frist, DeLay, Bush, etc. superimposed inside the same bottle with the “brilliant” caption “Absolut Corruption.”

Which is, when you think about it, goddam stoooopid. None of the persons inside were involved in scandals related to alcohol, drinking, etc. The piece (I checked) showed up the DAY that Stephanie Miller posted mine on her radio show website, and while I am loathe to claim “plagiarism” or “joke theft” — and noting that that ad has been used for parodies since at least 1999 — my intuition tells me exactly where it was gotten, and is repelled in a justifiable manner that the “theft” wrecked the “joke.”

That which was witty (or halfway so) had been shorn of its humor, and yet was celebrated by the various media.

So, I guess I don’t have to worry about being quick here, or about trying to write anything useful. What I really need is a publicity agent. After all, when the carbon copies of my stuff, wan though they may be, are feted, then perhaps there is some small place in the firmament of phony laurels and media fawning for your humble correspondent’s work.

Or maybe not.

But, as long as we’re dropping names, metaphorically, I have to tell you that I heard the name “Stanley K. Hathaway” in the media, preceded by “the late” — which saddened me, because I knew Stanley K. Hathaway.

The occasion was the weird trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming that Cheney was sent on last week, like Nixon’s weird trip to Egypt, where he was cheered by the Egyptian masses and then he came home and resigned. Cheney had been lying all week, and the whole surreal story was in full melting-watch mode, and Cheney needed to be cheered, so he went back and gave a speech in the capitol building to the Wyoming Territorial Legislature.

Whoops! Sorry: I tend to forget that Wyoming is no longer a third world country, administered by the Eastern states for the sole purpose of extracting natural resources and raw materials. We got our statehood, but for some reason Wyoming in my youth was — and remains — a colony from which raw materials are extracted, and to which finished goods are then sold. [Note, 2008 -- See "Into the West" parts I and II from September.]

Cheney talked about Stanley K. Hathaway.

Hathaway was a florid-faced man, with a handlebar mustache (in ‘68): a Wyoming politician, he reminded you of a sort of “President Taft Lite.” Corpulent, but not overly so, he was Governor of Wyoming in 1968, when I was a page at the Wyoming State Republican Convention, held in Laramie.

Evidently, in 1965, Hathaway hired a young prick named “Dick Cheney” as a legislative aide in Cheyenne, the state capitol, 60 miles from Laramie over Pole Mountain, past the giant, brooding granite boulders of Vedauwoo (pronounced VEE-duh-voo):

“Land of the Earthborn Spirit”. At an altitude of 8,000 feet, Vedauwoo is a rather secluded rocky oasis in southeastern Wyoming, filled with dense pine forests and aspen groves. It is surrounded by a seemingly endless expanse of high plains and lies under a dome of intense cerulean blue sky. Views from the tops of the crags are stunning, and one can see from Wyoming’s ragged mountains clear down the Continental Divide to Long’s Peak, some 75 miles south in Colorado. A multitude of free-ranging animal species are commonly found here, including small mammals, antelope, deer, cattle, climbers and an occasional black bear or cougar.

and past Ames Monument:

Monument Plaque reads: “The Ames Monument. Left picture reads 1868 Work Train; right side picture is Town of Sherman. Completed in 1882 at a cost of $65,000, this monolithic, 60-foot high granite pyramid was built by the Union Pacific Railroad Company. It stands on the highest elevation (8,247 feet) of the original transcontinental route. Until 1901–when the railroad was relocated several miles to the south, it passed close by the north side of the monument where once stood the rail-town of Sherman.”

And the Tree in the Rock, a pine tree that grew through a granite boulder the size of a house (aided by buckets of water from passing caboosemen on the Union Pacific main line).

And the Lincoln Monument — celebrating the highest point on the “Lincoln Highway” or, US Highway 30, which was, by 1968 already becoming its replacement, Interstate 80, from New York, New York to San Francisco, California, the East-West arterial that generally follows the original transcontinental train route.

http://www.vedauwoo.org/history1.htm

The first transcontinental highway was proposed in 1912 by Carl Fisher, President of Prest-O-Lite Corporation, more as a publicity scheme than anything else. His company had just designed ingenious gas headlamps for automobiles. The cause was taken up by Henry Joy, President of Packard Motor Company, who proposed the name “Lincoln Highway”. A road 3500 miles long was carved out from New York to San Francisco and in 1919, Dwight D. Eisenhower, fresh out of West Point, accompanied a makeshift caravan of adventurers on the first trip. Obviously, the road bore no resemblance to the modern freeway, US Interstate 80, we know it as today.

It only used to be a couple of bucks to take the train round-trip between the two towns — Laramie the college town and Cheyenne the railroad hub and state capitol — but most people drove, which is probably what Cheney did.

It was around 1965 that Dick Cheney screamed at me for five minutes in a Laramie courtyard, and then at my father for another couple of minutes.

My father, being the man that he was, DIDN’T cold-cock Cheney (although I probably would have) and, in his quiet way, just waited for our future Vice President to calm down, and agreed to take care of it.

Yes, I was in trouble again.

I’ve waited to tell you about it, because it didn’t seem like the proper time. But I have no doubt of it, although I will give you the ammunition to pick holes in my awful name-dropping, and rightly so. Memory plays tricks on us all.

But I recognized that throbbing vein when he gets mad, and it took me a long time to realize that when he’d screamed at me, he had hair, which is another reason that I’ve held off telling about it. In my mind’s eye, I didn’t recognize him.

Married housing at the University of Wyoming was a quadrangular complex of single-story red brick duplexes and quadraplexes, just northeast of War Memorial Stadium (the home of the Wyoming Cowboys football team), the highest elevation major stadium in the United States at the time, and all apartments opened onto a central white-concrete-covered-with-white-gravel commons in the center. The only salient feature of this barren wasteland (at least from a kid’s point of view) was that there were endless “T” bars set into the concrete, between which were strung wire clotheslines. (The prevailing Laramie winds would have torn rope or cord lines to flinders in no time at all).

My little brother John and I were being babysat by a student/friend of my mother’s, whose father was the head of the Tribal Council of the Wind River Reservation up towards Jackson Hole and Yellowstone. Even then, at nine years old, I used to tell her that she should be in the Miss America competition because she was much more beautiful than any of those B-52 blondes and brunettes that were paraded as 1960s epitomes of feminine pulchritude — but I digress.

The B-52 or beehive hairdo - fashion's gift to the ozone

What the hell: I digress.

I was later told that she was very flattered, but that the Arapaho considered such a display to be taboo, an embarrassment, etc. I suspect that racism was involved, too (racism against her by the Whites, sad to say) but I was not aware of such horrors then. Still, I learned NOT to say anything about Miss America, to be considerate of her feelings — coached by my mother.

She and her husband would have children of their own within a year or two, but they were happy to babysit on those rare nights that my parents went to a movie, a dance, a dinner — I suppose to “try out” being parents. If they could have been scared away from the prospect of children, I’ll note, we were probably the boys to do it.

I fear that we tended to be little hellions with babysitters. I don’t know why. But we always managed to get into trouble, and that day, we managed to get into trouble by inventing what turned out to be a wildly popular game on that desolate wasteland of a “back yard.”

Cheney must have just flunked out of Yale, then. He would be getting his undergraduate degree at the University of Wyoming, and he and his pint-sized wife, Lynn lived in an apartment on the southern end of the western face of the married housing rectangle.

I can still see her in my mind’s eye (another thing that convinces me it was really them) her arms folded, and her beehive hairdo adding what seemed like a third again her diminutive height, scowling imperiously behind the sliding-glass patio doors.

Cheney was either coming off of his flunking out or out of his legislative aideship — either way he was one of those WAY-TOO-OVER-THE-TOP kind of adults, like a sadistic gym teacher or a fascist coach. When he screamed (which was mostly what I saw him do, I must confess that if I ever saw him in dormant mode, I don’t register it) his face filled with blood, and the veins on his neck and temples bulged out.

It was scary but also a little comical.

Here’s what happened:

We figured out a game where we would ride those little BMX bikes (at the time they were the tiny bikes with the tall “chopper” handlebars, I forget what they were called) at full speed under the clothesline poles, and then we’d grab the pole, and swing as the bicycle continued on its suicide mission across the compound.

Perhaps this is why Cheney is so fearful of terrorists to this very day. I do not know.

Since there wasn’t anything to get in the way, the bikes could go a long ways, but nowhere near to ever getting to the north wall. We ended up having a contest to see who could get a riderless bike the furthest distance before it fell down.

I thought it was very inventive, and we had managed to amuse ourselves in the absence of any actual possibility of amusement. But, as I would learn, Dick Cheney did not share this opinion.

I guess we were right in front of their glass patio window-door-sliding-view. At some point, eventually, after a long while of all kinds of “neighborhood” kids trying it, Dickie boy came storming out from behind the patio door and started screaming at me.

Me, personally, since I was the organizer, inventor and impresario of the little adventure. No one had been hurt, and nothing but fun had transpired, but, as it turned out, we had broken TWO SPOKES on one of the bicycles, and this blatant anarchic hooliganism was evidently too much for the childless Cheneys and he screamed at me for a good long time.

That was when I was accorded the opportunity of studying the bulging of his veins. REALLY studying them. I don’t really remember what he SAID, actually, but it was as close to obscenity as one could get without actually crossing the line.

Fine. He’d speak to my parents. I was suitable impressed by his authority (I didn’t sass back, or tell him to f**k himself, which, in retrospect, I suppose I wish I would have done). But he didn’t scare me, either. I “knew” that he wouldn’t dare touch me, and I stood my ground — that bad habit that continues to this very day in the face of bullies.

We returned to the relative safety of our baby-sitter’s apartment, in the middle of the south line of the apartments, and we knew that Dad had to talk to the screaming man on the west side. I felt bad that I’d made trouble for my beautiful baby-sitter and her Chicano husband; but I always got into trouble, no matter how hard I tried not to.

At least I was used to it.

I resigned myself to the inevitable spanking, lecture and slapping around (this would be one of those things where both Mom and Dad would want to get their licks in, separately), and the time passed, too slowly.

Naturally, I was guilty until proven innocent when the happy parents came to collect us, and what had been a glad evening was suddenly suffused with tragedy.

But they were used to it, too.

click to enrage

My dad took us and he spoke to Cheney a few feet from Cheney’s apartment, almost exactly where hairy Dick had screamed at me earlier. I heard him start to scream at my Dad, and I learned something important that I’d been lectured from the time I was old enough to be lectured: It takes a bigger man to walk away from a fight than to get into one. Big talk, of course, but that night, for the first time, I watched my Dad take this pipsqueak martinet’s shite without batting an eyelash. He walked the walk. And THAT impresses nine-year-old boys quite a lot.

Cheney was screaming about how we little vandals had destroyed property and were headed for juvenile hall, and demanded that we pay for the repairs of the two spokes — which was interesting, considering that they were childless, to the best of my knowledge. Either way, he didn’t have a dog in the fight. The Broken Spokes belonged to no bicycle of his, that much was clear.

And later my Dad would confess that he DID feel “like cold-cocking the sonofabitch” but he held his temper, and that was a lesson that I still carry.

Would that I could practice it, I add ruefully.

Dad agreed that we would take care of it. And so he did. And Cheney, having nothing else to scream about, re-entered his stygian Chamber Of Gloom.

Naturally, when we got home, we were prepared for the worst, but Cheney had done us a great favor: by behaving like such an over-the-top a-hole, he’d convinced my Dad that we hadn’t really done anything wrong.

I assumed that it would come out of my “allowance” of 25 cents a week, but when allowance time came, my Dad gave me my quarter and told me “Two spokes cost twelve cents, and I don’t feel like making change.”

And that was that.

Still, I count myself suitably famous now, having been screamed at by the Future Vice President of the United States when I was nine years old.

He seemed awfully steamed up over two six cent spokes.

In the following year, 1966, I think, Stanley K. Hathaway was elected Governor of Wyoming, and I met him on several occasions. He was a very nice man, if you happened to be a kid in Wyoming that age.

I never saw Dick Cheney again, or at least it wasn’t until I saw him as Veep, angry at something and that vein bulging slightly as the old demon came smoking out of his cave that I suddenly realized WHO that was.

Cheney explaining why he feels the need to use such big guns to kill so many things

I mean I knew who Cheney was, because he was from Wyoming, and there are damned few of us from Wyoming. So you always pay attention. Our license plates have prefixes that are numbers of the various counties (Cheyenne is 2, Laramie is 5, Casper, where Cheney’s from is 1, and Jackson Hole is 22, for instance) and anyone who’s ever lived in Wyoming, or has been driving with someone who did, knows about the license plate trick). I’d followed Cheney as Ford’s Chief of Staff, and as Congressman (carpetbagger) from Wyoming in the Eighties. And then, in the late Eighties as Secretary of Defense during Operations Desert Shield, Storm, and Simonize.

And I knew he’d been hired as CEO of Halliburton.

But I never knew, until that little tantrum on some podium, that it was the same a-hole who’d screamed at me over twelve cents worth of hardware that wasn’t even his concern.

But it all fits. I bring this up to impress you — now that we know what sort of fellow he is — with what a miracle it was that I wasn’t shot that night.

No: instead it’s my son whose throat he’s got a gun barrel pressed against.

Small world.

Courage.

========

OK, back to the present day. My son’s unit, after serving a year in Iraq, was rotated out for 2008, and I can finally sleep without a knot in my stomach.

Cheney spent part of today DEFENDING telling a United States Senator to “Go F*@! yourself!” on the FLOOR of the U.S. Senate and doesn’t “get” that it is not only indefensible, but was NEVER defensible.

But then you know what they say:

Once a Dick, always a Dick.

Next time you’ve got your ouija board out, just ask Nixon.

Courage.

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