Cheney, Halliburton Connection Under Close Scrutiny

uestions raised in the past week about the conflict of interests between Vice-President Dick Cheney and contracts awarded to his former firm Halliburton and its subsidiaries have given Democrats a weak spot in criticizing the information. The controversy rose to attention upon revelation that a 2-year contract with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root to put out oil fires, repair the Iraqi oil infrastructure, and clean up oil spills could mean as much as $7 billion for the company, which Cheney was CEO of for five years before becoming the president's running mate.

The company denies any impropriety, despite senior Democratic Congressman saying the lack of any competitors and the multi-year nature of the contract is highly questionable. Halliburton spokespeople say the $7 billion return is a cap, and the real return will be as little as $490 million. The distinct sound of giggling was possibly in the background.

Deeper investigation has raised more issues with the Halliburton-Cheney connection. Subsidiary company Orlando-Dawn is the leading maker of yellow ribbons, and had been going out of business for nearly ten years before the Bush administration began its military efforts against Iraq, leading some Democrats to claim Cheney's manipulation has again resulted in increased profits for his former company.

Other beneficiaries of the Iraq war have been Keymint, makers of pro-Bush picket signs; Igog, makers of the "Dunk Saddam!" online video game; and the Stubborn Jackass country, which makes American flag-themed apparel and T-shirts reading "These colors don't run"—all Halliburton subsidiaries.

"It's hardly surprising our interests would match those of the Vice-President's," defended Halliburton spokesperson Mitchell Weeze, a tall oily guy on the thin side with a mysterious lazy eye. "Vice-President Cheney and Halliburton made for a mutually beneficial alliance because we believe in the same things—America, the military, and imposing justice on other countries. It doesn't mean anything improper occurred in the administration's decision-making or the contracts awarded our companies."

Harder to explain were other revelations later in the week, such as the contract proposed that Halliburton would paint the White House a new off-white eggshell color over the summer. The contract, which was discussed and had not been awarded yet, was even more questionable since none of Halliburton's subsidiaries are involved in professional house painting. An administration insider said the exclusive contract would have been for $120 million and would have required Halliburton executives to paint the White House over a series of weekends off the company clock.

The same insider, a man who identified himself as Donald Rumsfeld's brother Sammy, said perks of future contracts would include extra keys to the White House doors and the privilege of crashing in spare White House bedrooms whenever board members were in town—or on the floor, if that's cool with them.

Cheney responded quickly, with Cheney-grade antagonism.

"All of those purported benefits are completely, utterly fabricated," said Cheney in a press release Friday. "The deal was they could stay in the guest bungalow out back. If they think we're giving up White House bedrooms for less than 7-figure campaign donations, they're out of their corporate mind."

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OH MY GOD SNOW

All that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.

But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.

The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.

Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's, it was glass eating. Linebacker Greg Luzinski started the trend when he accidentally ate an entire beer mug while drunk, thinking it was a beer popsicle. The trend spread across the nation at the speed of stupid and before long college kids everywhere were eating light bulbs whenever they didn't have time for a sit-down meal. University facilities budgets went through the roof and Charmin released a new line of red toilet paper that hid evidence of inconvenient anal bleeding. Unfortunately, the fad proved short lived when Luzinski did, dropping dead of a glassasscopy in 1977.

Every decade, or pseudo-decade, also has its brilliant way to bilk doofuses out of their cash, and the 70's version was the pet rock. Created by a California inventor who dreamed of finding a way to turn the rocks on his front lawn into weed, and unleashed on a public tired of feeding freeloading animals and starving African children, the pet rock was an enormous hit among Americans who didn't know what to get their brother's kids for Christmas. The versatile pet rock also served a dual purpose, both as a gag gift and a weapon to be thrown at gag gifters.

No overview of 70's fads would be complete without a mention of disco, which was not so much a fad as aural wallpaper for the fad of the 1970's themselves. What more can be said about the most misguided musical idea since Mozart's tuba sonata? Not much, though in all fairness you could do worse if you want a soundtrack for doing cocaine and screwing your sister. What you couldn't do much worse than, however, is "Disco Duck," 1976's answer to New Age theories that there was no Satan.

As you're probably starting to catch on, everything in the 1970's was a fad, and thank God. One of the more embarrassing was the practice of talking to plants, originated by hard-up stoners chanting "Grow, weed, grow!" to their closet garden creations and crossing over to the flakiest strata of the mainstream, who took the April 1st edition of Scientific American at face value. Other notable fads originated in this "April Fool's" issue include aromatherapy and cancer research.

Nixon brought acupuncture back with him from China like a rat in his suitcase, and this fad spread faster than you could stick a sewing needle into a yuppie's ass. While certainly high on unintentional humor factor, acupuncture sacrificed some of its usefulness as a fad by looking really uncomfortable and causing people to cringe at the same time as they were laughing at the yoyos being stuck with the needles.

The 70's fad that probably least deserved to die was EST therapy, a revolutionarily hilarious idea based on putting the patient into a room full of assholes and yelling at them. The suicide rate during treatment was 100%, and as a result the fragile members of the species were weeded out of the herd in time for the alpha dog orgy known as the 1980's. The psychiatric profession has seldom known a treatment so efficient or fun to watch, and EST will be sorely missed.

The 70's also saw the invention of the hacky sack, which finally gave American teens something to do while they were in college. George Abrams, the inventor of the sack, was inspired by watching a Massachusetts mental patient who would compulsively kick himself in the nuts as if he were playing one of those ball-string-and-paddle games. Abrams was struck with the idea of how fun this might be if in didn't involve getting kicked in the balls so much, and something sort of like a sport was born.

While 8-tracks, CB radios and hideous string art creations all held their own as ridiculous 70's time-wasters, the moped really takes the cake as the defining piece of 1970's crap. With all the danger and inconvenience of a bicycle, but none of the exercise, the moped captured the cheap-assed imaginations of a country that thought gas was expensive. Hundreds of thousands of mopeds were sold during the Mideast oil embargo in 1973, with every last one of them being traded away for pocket fuzz and spare buttons at garage sales or pushed off a cliff six months later when the Arabs turned the gas tap back on. Which, if you've ever tried to ride a bike in bellbottoms, you know was probably the best thing that happened during the 70's.

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If my inbox and the random uninformed street noise are any indication, interest in the ancient Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander the Great is at an all-time high right now, thanks in large part to the release of the Alexander the Great's Great Abs workout video last month. But some portion of the public's Alexanderlust is likely attributable to Oliver Stone's upcoming biopic, which garnered blood-red headlines recently due to Stone's decision to make the film's battle scenes more realistic by staging actual battles between armies of actors, leading to hundreds of casualties. America was outraged and excited, while the rest of Hollywood was relieved that there'd finally be some waitering jobs opening up around town.

But with renewed public slob interest always comes the usual swarthy stink of misinformation, and this time it has clouded around Alexander's so-called reputation as a great military leader. The trouble here is that most modern persons tend to think of sarcasm and irony as relatively recent inventions. But in fact, people in the ancient past were far more sarcastic than we are today, which has lead to more than a few historical misconceptions. Chief among these is the story of Alexander "the Great," an astonishingly mediocre leader who was given his title by a highly ironic public. Likewise with other historical misnomers, including the "Great" Wall of China, Atilla the "Hun," and the Ottoman "Empire."

The ancient Macedonians were the most sarcastic people in recorded human history, a trait many historians believe lead to their downfall, since it eventually became impossible to tell when anyone meant anything sincerely at all. In those days "Alexander the Great" was always said with an eye roll and a drawn out vowel in the word "great," implying a sentiment like "Oh greeeeat, here comes that shithead Alexander."

Alexander was a handsome young man, by the standards of that day, which meant he was ugly. As a boy Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, but not correctly, since Aristotle enjoyed nothing more than proving his superiority by teaching bogus information and marveling at how stupid children were to never catch on. Aristotle's tutelage provided the foundation for Alexander's life-long misunderstanding of world events, which led to his conquering of allies Persia and Arcadia in 330, then the eventual conquering of his own nation during a bloody siege in 328 B.C.

Alexander took over the throne of Macedonia after the murder of his father, Philip the Merely Adequate, in 336 B.C. Historians believe that Alexander's mother Olympias plotted Philip's murder, thanks in part to the cryptic title of her later autobiography, Die, Cocksucker. Some point the blamey finger at Alexander himself, due to the well-known fact that he went out of his way to piss on his father's grave every morning thereafter for the rest of his life. Even when he was away at war, Alexander would send special scouts back from the front to "water" the grave every morning at dawn. But this was a common show of respect in those times, at least among the rare sons who hadn't been poisoned or wrapped in bacon and left unsupervised to wander in the lion pen by their fathers before reaching adulthood.

After succeeding his father as king, Alexander shocked the kingdom by not assassinating his retarded brother Arrivederchus, which counted as extreme liberalism back in those days. In actuality, Alexander liked to keep Arrivederchus around to help him look more "the Great" in comparison, and his somewhat autistic brother was handy for estimating casualty figures after large battles. This unprecedented show of open-heartedness also served as a public-relations boon after Alexander had most of the rest of his family assassinated.

Among Alexander's many achievements over the course of his career were the conquerings of the Tits and the Oldmans, and providing universal health care for single-parent families. Alexander made a name for himself primarily by conquering peoples who were just on the verge of collapsing already, then taking credit for an astounding military victory. When Alexander conquered the Dinks in 326 B.C., Macedonian soldiers actually had to roust most of the Dink army from their beds to inform them that they'd been conquered. This took several days, since the Dinks were profoundly heavy sleepers, and this harrowing campaign went down in history as one of the most grueling of Macedonian military victories.

Peoples were routinely being conquered back then, because no one really gave two shits about that kind of thing, and if somebody wanted to all the fuss and headache of being the ruler, then they could have it. Any enterprising or even vaguely competent military leader could make an easy name for himself conquering the many apathetic kingdoms that littered the map in those days. Long-forgotten peoples like the Choads, the Ninnies, and the Blue Finks existed in large part just to be conquered. Oftentimes a conquering army would send ahead advance scouts to organize the haphazard country folk into "nations" of people so that they could be conquered in a memorable fashion.

Even with that being the case, Alexander got a little carried away with it and ended up conquering most of the known world before he was done. That the "known world" consisted of only a 20-square mile radius around Macedonia was of little consequence at the time, since nobody knew that there were oodles of other peoples out there remaining unconquered in far-off places. Twenty miles is still a long way to walk, however, and the Macedonian soldiers never forgave Alexander for making them hoof it so far entirely on foot, due to his lust for horsemeat gyros.

Regardless, Alexander conquered many a feeble people, and his troops came to call him "King of Everything," because he told them to.

Alexander eventually died of a broken heart at the age of 32, on the outskirts of Macedonia in 324 B.C. Historians are split over whether this was a romantic kind of broken heart, brought on by the untimely and ultimately tacky death of Alexander's lifelong gay lover Homocleus, or if this was just a primitive medical term referring to the fact that Alexander's heart reportedly leapt out of his mouth like a bullfrog while he was being beaten to death by the very soldiers he'd dragged to all ends of creation on his asinine crusade.

Alexander was survived by his wife and their son, the byproduct of an uncomfortable seven-minute tryst made necessary by the high failure rate of man-on-man pregnancies in ancient times. Though homosexuality was the norm of the day and a lot more fun, men of power still took brides for the purposes of creating an heir, necessitating an awkward wedding night followed by twice-yearly postcards on major holidays.

After Alexander's death, his mother had virtually everyone else in the government killed in various plots, until her machinations became too complex and she inadvertently plotted to have herself killed in 318 B.C. In time, Alexander's son Alexander the Better Than You've Heard became king, only to be killed soon after as a result of one of Olympias's old plots that someone found lying around.

With the release of Stone's film, audiences will at long last flock to learn the truth about Alexander, or at least four or five will who aren't going just for a chance to see Colin Farrell's dong.

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