Richard Cheney is the rotund and sparsely beloved Vice President of the United States. The civilized world regards him with no affection whatsoever.
During the last week of November, Mr. Cheney had a bout with atrial fibrillation. This is a cardiac condition that, if left untreated, could result in grave damage to the heart muscle and perhaps injury or death to the person who owns that heart muscle. Atrial fib is a common occurrence among cardiac patients. Once it is properly diagnosed it can be remedied by having a cardiologist apply an electric current to the heart and shock it back into its proper rhythm. To the person who owns a heart with atrial fib, the sensation is that of an engine missing fire on several cylinders and perhaps backfiring on some of the others. All things considered, atrial fib is not a desirable condition.
Mr. Cheney has had several bouts with atrial fib. The latest diagnosis was made and, after he was transported to a hospital and given the shock treatment, the rhythm in his heart was restored. From that point forward, we are told that his heart purred like a three-cylinder engine or like a Lawn Boy power mower. According to White House sources, the same people who brought you weapons of mass destruction and “mission accomplished,” Mr. Cheney went home from the hospital, shaved, and appeared in his office at his usual 7:00 AM starting time. It is quite likely that Mr. Cheney appeared at his office to guard against Congressman Henry Waxman making further inroads on the Valerie Plame CIA outing case. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald had promised Waxman that he would give him the papers in that case. But we find now that Cheney and the White House have blocked that move.
In any case, Mr. Cheney, with his heart rhythm fully restored, resumed thinking about the war in Iraq. You may recall that at the beginning, Mr. Cheney assured us that we would be welcomed as liberators and further down the line, he counseled us that the insurgency was in its final throes. I suppose that a person in his position, with all the pressures on him, is entitled to make a few monumental mistakes. However, when Mr. Cheney entered the vice presidency, he found that the Bush administration started to pee away trillions of dollars that the Clinton administration had in the Treasury. Mr. Cheney assured the rest of us, including the financial community, that “deficits don’t matter.”
At the outset, I believed Mr. Cheney implicitly. I concluded that if deficits don’t matter, my quarterly payment of income tax to the government would fall in that category of non-applicable deficits. At the beginning, the Feds were polite to me, pointing out that if I did not make my contribution, they would be unable to pay salaries to the President and the Vice President and to members of Congress. The people at the Internal Revenue Service were not enthusiastic about my reference to Mr. Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter.” In the end, they proposed to send the FBI and the CIA to Short Hills to have me flown to Syria or Egypt, where waterboarding is merely the start of an “enhanced interrogation procedure.”
When my real estate taxes came due here in Millburn Township, I asked the tax collector, Jerry Viturello, “If deficits don’t matter, why am I making this payment to you?” He replied that if I failed to make the payment, the Millburn cops would be there shortly to have me thrown out on White Oak Ridge Road, a very busy street.
So you see that if deficits don’t matter, it must apply only to big shots, such as Mr. Cheney and his cohorts. After having been rebuffed by the federal government and by the Millburn tax collector, I called my old friend Jake Birdsall, who is the resident philosopher in the city government of a town called Peculiar, Missouri. Jake is a gravedigger by trade, but he lectures at the Peculiar County Community College on philosophy. I told Jake, the philosopher/gravedigger, all of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Cheney’s belief that deficits don’t matter. Almost immediately, Jake offered his cogent viewpoint to me. Jake said, “Any man who says that deficits don’t matter is as full of spit as a Christmas goose.” Obviously, I had to sanitize the operative word in the early part of that sentence because my essays are used as textbooks in the Peculiar County Seminary. We can’t have prospective men of the cloth uttering vulgarities that have been with us since the beginning of time. So the final word is that, as Jake framed it, “Anyone who says that deficits don’t matter is as full of spit as a Christmas goose.” Jake also pointed out that deficits have consequences, terrible consequences.
We are learning about those consequences right now. The value of our dollar is so low that we will soon be down there with the Mexican peso. The British pound that used to trade at one dollar and a half now costs us two dollars. The European Euro which opened at about seventy cents now takes a dollar and a quarter to buy one. The Canadian dollar, which in my lifetime has never exceeded seventy-two or seventy-three cents, is now worth ten or fifteen cents more than the American dollar. Jake the philosopher, is absolutely correct about Mr. Cheney being as full of spit as a Christmas goose. He is even more correct when he says that attitudes like Cheney’s are utter madness. Every time we buy gasoline, wine, cheese, or any other commodity, those consequences are obvious.
So much for Mr. Cheney, his atrial fib, and Jake’s assessment of his financial acumen.
At the moment there are two other individuals of American renown who come to mind at this sitting in the first week of December. The first is Senator Larry Craig, the Senior Senator from the great state of Idaho. I am sure that you are aware that Senator Craig has confessed to and tried to “unconfess” the act of making a homosexual pass at an undercover officer in a Minneapolis airport men’s room. When he tried to “unconfess” that act, he merely intensified the efforts of the Boise Idaho Statesman, a newspaper, to investigate whether he was in fact a homosexual. Please bear in mind that this corner here has no debate about homosexuality. They can lead their gay life and I can lead mine without interference from anyone. The point is that Senator Craig has uniformly voted against every bill that would even remotely benefit gay people. Simply put, Craig is a hypocrite in the extreme.
Now Craig has stirred up a hornet’s nest, and the newspaper from the capital city of Idaho has produced at least four or five men who have told the newspaper that they had sexual encounters with the great and glorious Senator Craig. They not only told of those encounters but they described the details, which would not make the approved reading list in the Peculiar County Seminary. In point of fact, Craig has been caught dead to rights. All of this simply goes to show that Jake, the gravedigger/philosopher, was absolutely right when he said, “Actions have consequences.” In the Craig case, those consequences might involve his departure from public life earlier than the January 2009 date that he had proposed.
There is one other thought about a man who has stirred up the newspapers and is now suffering the consequences. That of course would be Rudolph Giuliani. Mr. Giuliani, who is the reputed leader among voters for the Republican nomination for President in 2008, is in fact a sordid spectacle among New Yorkers who can remember his term in office. While he was in office, he had an affair with his so-called “public relations director,” whom he installed in a high-level position in the New York City Visitor’s Bureau. She remains there today. But beyond that, Mr. Giuliani entered into an affair with a woman who had a summer house in the Hamptons. The affair went on for quite some time and she is now his third wife.
Under the police laws of New York City, the mayor and his wife and children are entitled to round-the-clock protection by the police department. Mr. Giuliani has now stirred up the New York Daily News, a Republican paper, to the point where it is reporting on all of the events that took place during the grand affair with the current Mrs. Giuliani. Having twenty-four-hour protection by the New York City police department is not without some cost. While Mr. Giuliani was snuggling and cooing with Mrs. Nathan, his mistress, in her condo in the Hamptons, the New York City police detectives who accompanied him were collecting regular and overtime pay. According to receipts, those same cops were treating themselves to man-sized steaks and chops.
Obviously, the New York city police department became involved in substantial expenses while they were guarding Mr. Giuliani while he billed and cooed with Mrs. Nathan in the Hamptons. To cover these expenses, the costs were assigned to obscure New York City departments. For example, the Loft Commission had more than its share. The Loft Commission, I suppose, has to do with regulations concerning building lofts. Now that these expenditures have come to light, there is a scent of blood in the water. Rudy’s explanation for these expenses is thoroughly lame. He contends that the New York police department is slow in paying its bills but that the Loft Commission, for example, is quick to pay its bills. Hence he had the expenditures sent to that commission with the people who run lofts eventually trying to collect their money from the police department. Ray Kelly, the current Police Commissioner in New York, says that this is preposterous. Equally preposterous is Giuliani’s claim that it was the police department, not himself, that suggested round-the-clock protection for Mrs. Nathan shortly after this sordid affair began.
The point that is being made here is the same one with respect to Cheney and deficits and with Senator Craig and his hypocrisy. In the first place, “you don’t stir up a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Mark Twain made those remarks in the year 1900. They are as appropriate today as they were then.
Beyond buying ink by the barrel, there are consequences. Giuliani’s poll readings have been taking a beating in the race for the Republican nomination for the presidency. When the full extent of Giuliani’s gaffs become obvious to the rest of the United States, it is my belief that he will have a difficult time in becoming the Republican nominee for the presidency.
Before this essay ends, it should be pointed out that while he was romancing Mrs. Nathan, Giuliani held a news conference during which he fired his wife. Donna Hanover heard the news and was stupefied. But in fact he shed her as his second wife and took on the twice-divorced Mrs. Nathan. Losing a wife as lovely as Donna Hanover is another consequence of his actions.
Two other thoughts come to mind here. One involves the former police commissioner, Bernie Kerik, who is now under a sixteen-count indictment from the federal government. If there is a more disreputable character in this saga, it would be Bernie Kerik. But he has endorsed Mr. Giuliani’s story of assigning expenditures to an obscure commission within the city government. Curiously, the Comptroller says it just ain’t so.
Secondly, Mr. Giuliani has earned the endorsement of Pat Robertson, the preacher who says that he regularly talks to God. At the time of the September 11 disaster, Pat Robertson announced that God permitted the destruction of the World Trade Center because New York City permitted homosexuals to live their lives without discrimination from the authorities. According to Robertson, that’s why the World Trade Center was knocked down and why the Pentagon had its damage too.
Mr. Giuliani has gladly accepted the endorsement of Pat Robertson and even went to his headquarters in Virginia to get it. Does this man’s pandering have no limit?
There you have, in the cases of Cheney, Craig, and Giuliani, three instances where consequences have mattered. For every action, there is a reaction, which is the principle that brother Newton proposed at the beginning of time. Upon closer examination, this old former soldier and essayist must conclude that all three of those clowns are indeed as full of spit as a Christmas goose.
E. E. CARR
December 3, 2007
Essay 275
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Kevin’s commentary: In an essay full of awful people, I’m glad we got to be introduced to the philosodigger/graveosopher. He seems like a great dude and I would have been happy for him to take over the the job of pretty much any politician mentioned above.