Dick Cheney: Too Hot for TV

ice-President Dick Cheney unveiled a new "sassitude" last week, starting with Tuesday's off-color suggestion Sen. Patrick Leahy have sex with himself, and concluding with a spicier, not-ready-for-primetime Cheney fielding questions Friday from the White House press corps.

The VP surprised a number of political experts and average Americans alike by revealing a saltier disposition never before seen exhibited publicly by White House personnel. However, according to administration insiders, who crammed our doorways to volunteer information, Cheney has been quite the prick for years behind closed doors, so it was bound to come out sooner or later.

Things began innocently enough Tuesday morning, when on the Senate floor Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy to "fuck off," although some within hearing range claim the vice-president had been misheard, and he had actually said "fuck you." A senatorial class picture was being taken when the Democrat from Vermont fired a few barbs about Cheney's friends at the oil corporation Halliburton and allegations of abuse of power, and the vice-president responded with quite the filthy mouth, though some suggested Cheney's uncharacteristic response owed less to Leahy's comments and more to Sen. Mitch McConnell making bunny ears behind his head.

Plans had been made for Cheney to offer an explanation and possible apology for the remarks, when overnight White House polling showed drastic jumps in the VP's approval rating among males under 30, particularly African-Americans, a group Republicans have long struggled to reach. The vice-president responded via phone on CNN's Larry King Live.

"Balls to an apology, fuckface. I wouldn't piss a sorry on your freckled white ass. Leahy's a peckerhead and it's about time I laid down the law, put the smackdown him, bitch. 'Cause I'm for real." To which Larry King responded, "Is this Howard Stern screwing with me again?"

The Larry King interview caused some uproar among the FCC and some have speculated it may alienate some right-wing organizations, but Gallup polls reveal an even more distinct increase among young voters, including undecideds, so White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Cheney would keep that shit up.

"Mr. Cheney is keepin' it real, folks," McClellan said Thursday. "If you don't like the heat, stay the fuck out the kitchen. It's the Veep's world, yo, you just visiting."

Friday, Cheney poured on more foul-mouth rancor, sporting sunglasses and wearing untied Nike sneakers. He welcomed questions from the press corps and gave reporters unwanted nicknames, including "Dicknose" and "Faghag." This particular reporter unfairly earned the moniker "Gramma Titties."

"I know you all think I'm fucking with you, but I'm for real," said Cheney, pausing to inexplicably perform "the Worm" for reporters. "It's a dangerous world, motherfuckers, and it's about time we stop pussying up the language and say fuck when we mean fuck. And don't even think about getting in my face, I don't give a shit if you're a Democrat or Republican or one of them Green Party queens—you act the bitch, I'll treat you like a bitch. Bitch."

Cheney then leapt from the stage and slapped White House reporter Helen Thomas with a harsh backhand, sending the correspondent—whom he had nicknamed "Grape Ape"—wheeling to the back wall.

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I present to you, the King of throw-away island. Slicing a trench into the past, dogwoods spread their sprays like drifting clouds, the most wasteful member of the tree family. "King Trapper of the North" is how they'd like to be remembered. Hardly. Tubers, seeds, runners, corms, bulbs, rhizomes, roots and spores fan out like chuck wagons clattering in a figure eight. A boy sets out; a man returns, chromosomes aligning. Less secret are the lichens, and the groundhogs are without good cause, like spoiled vultures. Shaded by the cursed dogwood. Among the toughest of living things, A.L. van den Brandeler makes quick with the axe to help me single-hand her.

You will feed during summer's abundance, mate, lay eggs and die. Try again later.

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Ever since we heard Eddie Albert scream out "Dutch Whores!" at the beginning of TV's Green Acres, we've all been curious about hidden messages in popular songs. From the suburban teen getting a much needed self-esteem boost from Ozzy Ozborne's Suicide Solution to the congressman who desperately needs to figure out the lyrics to Louie, Louie before a press conference, nobody wants to be the last kid on the block to know what a song really means. But it's not always easy, between forgetful vocalists garbling their lyrics and clever rockers mixing backward paeans to Satan into their love songs.

The first known instance of a backwards message in a pop song is widely agreed to be Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' 1960 hit Shakin' All Over, which contained the phrase "Listen you tit, the tape's gone in backways" playing in reverse during the chorus.

But it was the Beatles who were the King Tut of hidden backwards lyrics, and they pulled off their ultimate coup in 1968, when they released The White Album, which was actually an entire Laurence Welk album played backwards. The world might never have been the wiser if it weren't for some meddling acid casualties who somehow managed to play the record backwards after dropping the record player into their bathtub in an attempt to hear what the album would sound like to fish.

But regardless, the word got out and before long drug people with serious welfare connections were rigging up elaborate backwards-playing record players by mounting one record player upside-down above another normal record player, then using the second player's needle to listen to a record spinning upside-down on the first.

For reasons unknown this led to a brief resurgence of popularity for the Dave Clark Five, but the main effect was that years of backwards-recording shenanigans were finally exposed. An evangelist from Ohio discovered that when he played the theme song from the TV show Mr. Ed backwards, the lyrics sang as "The source is Satan," and the theme song from the children's cartoon Scoobie Doo hid the back-masked message "Give your dog a doobie too." That same evangelist later discovered that when you play disco music backwards, nobody ever comes to your parties again, and backwards Slim Whitman is more than enough to get you evicted from your apartment building. He was later arrested during an album-burning ceremony when his supporters shot a horse wearing a baseball cap that said Mr. Ed.

Scandal raged for the next twenty years as religious figures from terminally boring states discovered further examples of back-masking tomfoolery. Sales of Queen's dance hit Another One Bites the Dust more than tripled after word got out that the chorus played as "It's fun to smoke marijuana" when run backwards, and there was a brief national shortage of chocolate chip cookies. Religious leaders single-handedly fueled sales of several Pink Floyd albums in the seventies, and were thanked individually in the liner notes for most of Judas Priest's 1980's releases. By the mid-eighties, it became tough to sell a heavy metal album without help from some kind of back-masking scandal, and some innovative groups had their records pressed backwards to minimize damage to their fans' turntables. By the late 80's, record companies were major campaign contributors for all representatives from southern states who advocated boycotts of their satanic recording artists.

The holy grail of all backwards Satan-possessed pop songs, however, has always been Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. Fans have known for years that the song only really makes sense when you play it backwards, at which point the lyrics come together as:

A horse is a horse
Of course of course
And no one can talk to a horse
Of course
That is, of course
Unless the horse
Is the famous Mister Ed!

Go right to the source
And ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse
He's always on a steady course
Talk to Mister Ed!

People yakkity-yak a streak
And waste your time of day
But Mister Ed will never speak
Unless he has something to say!

Oh, a horse is a horse
Of course, of course
And this one'll talk 'til his voice is hoarse
You never heard of a talking horse?


Well, listen to this:
". . . I am Mister Ed!"

So you can all stop sending me emails asking what the hell a wuzzle is doing in a hedgerow, okay?

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