Somewhere, cats are chasing dogs again. 

Rain’s falling up.  Tom Cruise is an accomplished heterosexual.  The current First Lady is dressed stylishly and appropriately. Al Sharpton, Henry Gates, Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, and the rest of the race-baiting gang admit the black community is responsible for its own problems. 

The whole world’s gone upside down, topsy-turvey mad because we’re at it again:  agreeing with Dick Cheney some more.  

Seriously, Dick Cheney has become our favorite ex-Vice President EVER.    We love that he still receives intelligence briefings, in whatever secure and undisclosed location he’s currently in, and that he’s more outspoken than ever about what stupid things our current Utopia Administration is doing.  

Dick Cheney is our Obi Wan Kenobi. 

He needs to mentor Sarah Palin into the Princess Leia/Luke Skywalker/Han Solo hybrid we need her to be. 

The Palins and the Cheneys need to join forces, STAT, because former Vice President Cheney has never been more right and Palin’s never had a bigger audience of people willing to listen to.  Someone reading this in either the Cheney or Palin camps should get on that…the sooner these two merge onto the same page and support one another, the better. 

And, no, GOP strategists, Dick Cheney is not a toxic asset that should be ignored.  The man is SPOT-ON correct about the naive foolishness and stupidity of the current occupants of the White House. 

He calls Dr. Utopia out for bowing to the Emperor of Japan…something we hope every WWII Pacific veteran gets out in public and condemns.  One of us here had a grandmother who worked with the USO in California during the war, cheering the troops leaving Los Angeles to, in many cases, meet their demise at the hands of the Empire.  To her death, she’d talk about “those babies, those faces, those young, young boys getting on those gray ships” and she’d well up with tears remembering it was “ship after ship after ship” that went off to never come back.  Sixty years later, that grandma never forgot Emperor Hirohito, and never forgave Japan for the atrosities it committed to not just American troops, but to mainland China, Korea, and Russia too.  Japan may be all about Hello Kitty and cheap electronics now, but back in the 40s under its god-Emperor, it was mainly concerned with rape, torture, blood-letting, and barbarism.  There are those of us who might not have been alive to bear witness to this, but remember it nonetheless.  

The American President should bow to NO ONE, least of all Earth’s last living Emperor.  As residents of Chicago well aware of the current president’s fondness for Man’s Country in Andersonville, we appreciate how much this man enjoys jutting his rump into the air and wiggling it before non-white foreign royals.  The Queen of England was treated by Dr. and Mrs. Utopia like the perfume sales lady at Marshall Fields on one of Mrs. Utopia’s extravagant shopping sprees, practically pushed out of the way as the Utopias jockeyed for the best camera angle to make her appear most insignificant and diminutive.  But, the King of Saudi Arabia, Falafel the Hutt, had his ring kissed by the current American president (who, it’s quite clear, would have kissed much more than that if allowed by Secret Service). For months, since that disgusting display in April, liberals have been claiming Utopia didn’t hoist his rear in the the air and slobber over Falafel the Hutt’s claw.  Maybe the display before the Emperor was just more of his “Lookit what I can do!  I can do whatever I want!” ego tripping.  Maybe he really does miss Man’s Country in ways that only Rahm Emanuel could ever understand.  But it certainly does seem like compulsion. 

And Dick Cheney calls him out on it. 

Dick Cheney also calls out notorious race-baiter Eric Holder for doing what it’s clear this administration wants to do:  give Khalid Sheik Muhammed and other 9/11 Muslim terrorists a Broadway-styled stage show in which to attack America in words the way they hit us with airplanes eight years ago (which is, like, so totally YESTERDAY and SO TOTALLY LONG AGO to all of Dr. Utopia’s supporters, we’re sure). Americans are going to pay tens of millions of dollars in court costs, security fees, and loss of business in the area surrounding that trial…and all we will get for that trouble is, as KSM’s defense team has already noted, a spirited explanation of WHY exactly Muslims decided they needed to murder 4,000 people on that terrible, terrible day in 2001. 

Dr. Utopia and Eric Holder are ecstatic over this.  We picture the scene in the Oval Office, with the two of them yukking it up, high-fiving each other, possibly mooning over Tiger Beat photos of R-Pat or the shirtless werewolves in New Moon.  In runs Rahm Emanuel, out of breathe, as usual.  ”I know what you were doing,” the current president says, a wink in his voice.  Eric Holder giggles like a school girl.  Closing the door to the Oval, a sunglassed Secret Service guy checks his zipper, red-faced. 

“No, girl, not this time.  But the day’s still young!,” Rahm insists, giggling with Holder for a beat, before telling the other two Gossip Girls how thrilled they all should be that everything’s going so well and according to George Soros’ plan.  

“Oh, George is going to be so happy with me.  First he made sure I got that Nobel Prize for being awesome, and now I want him to get me an Oscar.”

“Make it a De La Renta and I’m in!,” Holder pipes up, scoring a “good one”, according to the other Gossip Girls. 

“Make mine a Chanel.  I wanna be Jackie Kennedy!,” Rahm preens.

“At least someone in this White House would look like Jackie Kennedy, no matter what we have the media insist,” the current president rejoinders, eliciting squeals from his underlings.  That one is so good they all collapse to the floor for a two-minute tickle fight.  

“I win! I win! I win!”, the current president brays, before insisting the three of them get back to work to think of more ways to embarrass America, make it less safe, and undermine the economy and public morale to the point of collapse. “We better get back to work or George Soros will be mad at us”. 

How far off the mark are these imagined antics, really?

For eight years, we insisted Dick Cheney was hidden somewhere plotting and scheming, and we bet he was.  He’s still plotting and scheming.  But, you know what, that man was plotting and scheming FOR US.  He was plotting and scheming to PROTECT US.  He remains active and vigilent doing all he can to keep America safe and expose the current administration as the giggling, naive, reckless Gossip Girls they really and truly are. 

We are thankful every day his daughter Liz Cheney is also emerging as a force of nature in her own right.  

It is not unrealistic for us to believe Team Cheney meets on a regular basis, with the input of Lynne and Mary as well we hope, to find some way to stop the KSM and Muslim terrorists trials from ever happening in New York City civilian court.  

We’re certain holdovers from the McCain campaign and RNC are advising Sarah Palin to stay away from all things Cheney. We’re also sure the people around Cheney are advising him to stay away from Palin, as she’s a legitimate threat to the stale GOP elite (“She’s too rogue. The media makes fun of her.  She’s too folksy”).  

But, if the two camps, Teams Cheney and Palin, cut through that noise and team up…WOW…they would really and truly be able to stop the KSM trial by shaming Congress to step in and overrule Eric Holder before any of that madness comes to pass.  Cheney has the heft, the perspective, and the access to classified intel as a former VP that Palin does not have as a private citizen and former governor.  Palin has over 1 million Facebook friends and is on a national book tour where her every word is being broadcast to millions.  

If the Cheneys and Palins support each other, play off each other’s strengths, and come out on the same page, America wins. 

Dick Cheney, in his secure and undisclosed location, is a voice America needs to listen to RIGHT QUICK. 

And Sarah Palin, in our opinion, is just the person to make his points heard in a very big way. 

You betcha.

******

UPDATE:  One of our good friends asked us how we reconcile our current appraisel of Dick Cheney with how they feel (and how we felt) about the intelligence failures of 9/11…a day when we personally lost a friend in one of the towers, and where many people we know lost friends and family.  

We’re going to try to keep this brief, but 9/11 is something that’s still so raw for us all these years later that it’s hard to talk about in a few paragraphs.  In addition to our friend Jane (the most foul-mouthed, erascible Asian you would ever meet) dying that day, one of us here actually had breakfast at Windows on the World two days before the planes hit — and he’s never been the same since, either, realizing that breakfast overlooking the Statue of Liberty happened right at the time, a few days later, that the planes hit.  It’s a sobering and scary thing to think about, which further underscores how personal that day will always be. 

Our first thought ever about 9/11 is about comic books and cartoons, ridiculously enough, and the fact that we always just assumed the government had missile batteries up in tall buildings, or transformable antennas that turn into lasers, and other fail-safes to keep our major cities free of such attacks.  It’s ridiculous, yes, but growing up with G.I.Joe and the Transformers, it’s part of that Child of the 80s take on the world that doesn’t always serve us well.  Our parents had the James Bond world view, where super spies stop things like 9/11 from happening, so our assumption that the government would “somehow” shoot down an errant plane like that before it hit a building has some precedence.  

9/11 woke us up to the reality that the government doesn’t in fact know everything and can’t be Mother-Father-God-Protector even if it wanted to. 

When we played hockey and soccer, the goalie was the most underappreciated guy on the team, largely, because he never got the glory of scoring any goals and the many saves he made weren’t chalked up to him by spectators…instead, the opposing side just “sucked” for not being able to score.  But, it was the GOALIE who was blocking shot after shot after shot, to exhaustion.  It was the goalie who prevented disaster every time he suited up and hit the ice or field.  That guy has to block a million different possible attacks, while the offense just has to find one small exhaust pipe or ventillation shaft to blow up the whole Death Star. 

During the campaign in 2008, we got to know someone who spent a lot of time in defense contracting, doing very nebulous, not-talked-about things.  He was campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Akron, Ohio even though he was a Republican.  ”She needs to win this state and we need her to win the nominaton because it will be a Democrat president in November, and it can’t be Obama,” the man said, believing the Utopia gang would be an unmitigated disaster.  He insisted the Clinton people would know what they were doing with terrorist intelligence, while the Utopians would waltz in thinking they knew best, and that their approach to the world would warm the cockles of Muslim hearts and stop terrorism forever.  

This man said the Utopians are fools who will get a lot of people killed. 

He said they are worse than Condoleezza Rice’s crowd when she was National Security Advisor.  

The man, who we’ll call Jim, was not knocking Rice, whom he respects and of whom he says, “she got better later once 9/11 woke her up”. But, he does say when she came onto the scene, she was all Russia-focused because that’s where her background is, on Russian and Soviet studies. 

The Bush Administration came into office under  a cloud of illegitimacy in 2001.  The normal presidential transition from Clinton to Bush was usurped by the drawn-out election battle that really did eat into valuable passing-of-the-torch, sharing information time.  

We remain convinced the Clinton Administration very much indeed warned the incoming Bush White House about the potential for Al Queda to hijack jets and hurtle them into tall buildings.  Ultimately, Rice even admitted this was true.  HOWEVER, as anyone who has been involved in a lawsuit can attest, when stacks of paper are delivered to you and you are a human being in an administration of human beings, you might as well have a haystack with a needle embedded in it sitting on your desk.  

Rice and the Bush team were told about thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of potential attacks on the US from all sorts of people.  Jim, in Ohio, told us about a dozen attacks he knew of that were stopped leading up to New Year’s even in 1999.  Jim believes a lot of Y2K’s hysteria was dreamed up to put people on edge and distract them so they’d be less likely to be able to stop the actual crippling attacks, like blowing up LAX and thereby smashing a large part of the world’s pan-pacific air hub and spoke system in the process.  Jim called Y2K the chatter and shouting fans do to throw goalies off their game, and it almost worked but intelligence sources stopped all those attacks. 

There have been plots to destroy the New York, Washington, and Chicago subways.  There have been plots to take out Las Vegas, destroy Hoover Dam, and bomb the aquaducts supplying New York with water — which is the least talked about but most devastating plot we’ve ever heard of.  Without potable water, New York City would have to be abandoned in a matter of days because drinking water could be trucked in, but the sprinkler systems wouldn’t work in any of those buildings anymore, and neither would the fire plugs on the streets.  So, round one would have been cutting off the water…round two would be waiting a few days for all the sprinkler reserves to bleed away…round three would have been an arson spree to torch the whole city. 

If the aquaducts were taken out in several sections along their route from upstate down to the city itself, it would take years to replace them.  New York would have to be walled off, John Carpenter-style, in that time to keep it from being torched. 

Can you just imagine that?

But, goalies stopped that. 

The Bush Adminstration stopped plenty of attacks before, and after, 9/11. 

But, 9/11 got through.  We do not believe it was allowed to get through.  We do not believe the Bush Administration wanted it to get through.  IT JUST GOT THROUGH. 

A friend of ours was the goalie on our hockey team and the guy would cry after games when he’d miss a save and we’d lose the game.  Cry.  in the showers. Balling.  And he was a big, big guy.  But he would cry and all of us would leave him to it because the pressure on this kid was so massive all the time.  We just had to worry about either getting the puck to score off the opponent or running defense to take down whichever offensive members we were covering, but the goalie had to block EVERYTHING and fans expected him to be everywhere at once, like the giant naked blue man in Watchmen. 

99% of the time, our goalie was great, and didn’t end up crying in the shower.  But it’s that 1% of the time that people remember and talk about ad nauseum.  

We can say with 100% certainty that our friend Jane who died on 9/11 would not blame the Bush White House or Condi Rice for what happened.  She would blame Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheik Muhammad, and the Muslims who murdered her.  If one of us had been having breakfast at Windows on the 11th instead of the 9th or 10th, he’d feel the same way.  As scary of a concept as this is to accept, the government cannot solve all problems or stop all attacks.  Some will get through.  

At the end of the day, though, it boils down to whether or not we have people in government who are willing to do everything it takes to stop as many attacks as possible and to prosecute with unlimited fury those who attack us. 

We can never, EVER say the Bush White House did not do its level and determined best to bring all responsible for 9/11 to justice. We also an never, EVER say the Bush team did not, from top to bottom, try to stop as many terrorist attacks from happening as possible.  

One got through. 

Towers fell. 

4,000 died. 

But, Los Angeles is still here.  The rest of New York is still there.  Las Vegas is still here. 300  million people are still alive. 

There will be no recriminations against the Bush Team in this regard from us.  

Not after we’ve spent 8 years talking to people like Jim, having a meal with Jane’s family every year to talk about how foul-mouthed she was and how much she would want to rip the eyes out of everyone who did that to her, and rethinking our initial thoughts on Rice — who we did feel, back in 2001, was too Russia-focused and might have missed something about 9/11.

We wonder, now, what Russia was up to in 2001 that had Rice’s determined attention.  She is not a foolish woman.  She very well could have been averting WWIII if Putin wanted to launch his planned attacks on the Ukraine and other former satellites back then, when he thought America was destabilized and divided over the 2000 Gore recount.  The recent plays Putin has made in Georgia, with eyes always set on the Crimea, have made us seriously wonder what secrets someone like Rice could tell if ever she was allowed to.  

And that’s the thing we conclude all this on:  we are all regular people who don’t know the full side of things.  Sometimess we run into Jims who have more insight than we do.  Sometimes we encounter powerful politicians or military types who give us a tidbit here and there about the real deal.  But 99% of the time we’re all low-information about the REAL DEAL going on. 

But, we’re 100% sure the Bush and Clinton White Houses loved this country and worked night and day to defend it. 

We know one current Cabinet member is dedicated to that same purpose and sleeps about 3 hours a day because of her workload. 

The rest of this administration, in our opinion, is a giggle-prone and naive slumber party of naivety the likes of which the world has never before seen. 

We are serious when we say this, but GOD HELP US ALL.