what a hoot.
Wealthy Frenchman -
http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/Saturday, November 04, 2006 NYTimes
Throw the Truthiness Bums Out
By FRANK RICH
EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, Id go for Lynne Cheneys pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Its not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a childrens book titled Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.
The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheneys authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, Sisters, with steamy sexual interludes suitable for The L Word.
When Mr. Blitzer brought up Sisters on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many Sisters passages floating around the Internet: The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. But you cant have everything.
Even without Eve and Eve, this silly episode will stay with me as a representative sample of this election year. It wasnt just that the entire Cheney-Blitzer-Webb-Allen fracas had nothing to do with the issues that confront the country. It was completely detached from reality. Mr. Allen, who has been caught on video in real life spewing a racial epithet, didnt attack Mr. Webb for any actual bad behavior, but merely for the imaginary behavior of invented characters in a book. As if it werent enough for Mrs. Cheney to regurgitate Mr. Allens ludicrous argument, she fudged the contents of her own novel, further fictionalizing what was fiction to start with. Then she turned around and attacked CNN for broadcasting nonfiction a k a news like her husbands endorsement of waterboarding in a widely disseminated radio interview.