July, 2005

I know, I know, Dick Cheney’s comment that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” is old news, but the continuing kidnappings of diplomats, first the Eqyptian and now the Albanian, has apparently not been made known in undisclosed locations. The bombings increase in number and severity each week and if you haven’t seen the July 4th Doonesbury, be sure to check it out in the archives.

Actually, it seems the “undisclosed location” we hear so much about is not a place (as we might have thought) but a state of mind.

Who knew?

Retreating into his own head, where the constant accusations of war profiteering at his alma mater corporation are merely misunderstandings of how business is done, Cheney finds comfort in fiction. The man is a novelist.

Who knew?

Guantanamo isn’t the tie-em-to-the-floor and waterboard-em-till-they-talk internment center of front page revelation and Senate investigation. There are no mistreatments there, no attack dogs, no humiliations, no confinement without end and certainly no reasons to answer such biased and unfounded allegations. Speaking to Wolf Blitzer at CNN, Cheney said “There isn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people.”

Yeah, Dick. That’s not an answer, that’s the problem.

Reaching way back into the dim recesses of his undisclosed mental location, the Dick-Man continued to extrapolate “They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

Who knew?

I thought (obviously without the vice-president’s keen sensitivity) that perhaps, just perhaps, we ought to do what court after court has required us to do and start trying these people for whatever crimes we purported to hold them accountable. Embarrassingly, I had failed to realize they were on extended vacation.

Musing on his victories, the vp spoke eloquently of the 50 million people he had liberated in Iraq and Afghanistan. $200 billion (plus or minus another $200 billion, because nobody really knows) comes to somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000 for every liberated man, woman, child and insurgent in the two countries.

“That’s not the issue,” the Dick-Man would respond, slamming the same rhetorical door he repeatedly slammed in Colin Powell’s face. The Issue, in Dick-Man’s undisclosed mental location, is whatever he chooses it to be at the moment.

That’s called a ‘plot-twist’ in literary jargon. Take expectation right up to a brink and then deny the foreshadowing, bring your reader to a new and unsuspected realization. Larry King continues to flog the vp’s novelistic tendencies, as do the major talk-shows. It’s free and as entertaining as Jay Leno’s monologue, so why not?

Why not, indeed?

In true Harry Potter style, I can’t wait for the next exciting chapter coming down the pipeline from an undisclosed location.

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