An Undercover Liberal at CPAC: Bush Calls Cheney "Best Vice President in History"

Posted by Mister Leonard Pierce, Sadly, No! at 11:04 AM on February 8, 2008.

George W. Bush, when you get right down to it, is a fucker. That’s why I don’t like him. He’s a fucker who does fucked-up things. He’s a privileged little shit who doesn’t give a damp hell for the opinions of the people he was elected to govern. He buys into the toxic economic theories of unreconstructed capitalism, despite never having had to earn an honest living in his life, and he supports a worldview that cuts out anyone who hasn’t had his good fortune — the worldview of a murderous plutocracy stained with swaths of luck and cruelty where first is first and second is nobody. He’s stupid in the truest sense of the word: willfully ignorant and determined to surround himself with people who keep him that way, not only resistant to different ideas but actively hostile towards them. He is neurologically incapable of thinking ahead and he consigns the consequences of his actions to the status of dreams. And he forced his country into a pointless, unnecessary, unconscionably wasteful war that will poison every aspect of American life for generations.

Worst of all, though, the son of a bitch made me get up at two o’clock in the morning to go to his fucking speech at CPAC.

Now, I’m no stranger to sleeplessness. Ever since I started dating my girlfriend, Insomnia, I’ve been uite used to the experience of going hours, and even days, without shuteye. But people started lining up just after midnight to hear that limp-dicked flathead give his final CPAC speech as Asshole-In-Chief. It would have been easy enough to just throw back a final martini and hit the sheets, leave him to history and Captain Ed. Fuck him and his stupid self-flattering speechifying. But no: you don’t go to Rome and not see the Colosseum. You don’t come this far and then puss out. Besides, who knows what that bastard would do without me keeping an eye on him? They hired me to keep him honest, and while I’ll admit to not having done much of a job so far, being busy with my comic book collection and my heavy metal records, there’s no better time than right now to pick up the slack. I (information redacted to protect the aesthetic sensitivities of certain readers) and head back down to the catacombs of the Regency Ballroom, where human decency goes to die.

It’s a long, long wait. If I hadn’t (information redacted to preserve the well-known and much-beloved Sadly, No! house style), I’d probably be bored off of my spinal column. I’m surrounded by some of the most uptight, entitled white people in the world, and every time I try to strike up a conversation with someone, I have to lead off with my job as a lobbyist for the American Milk Solids Council, and then no one wants to talk to me anymore. Stuck-up Beltway shits! No concern for the working dairy conglomerate and its desire to ship low-cost, institutional-grade cheese powders to Southeast Asia without a lot of meddlesome bureaucratic interference. That’s compassionate conservatism. Also, by now, on approximately zero hours of sleep in the last fifty hours, my hair (which I have had neither the time nor the ability to have cut) is starting to look pretty raggedy. I decide that if anyone asks, I will claim that I am following the example of baseball teams in the playoffs: I will not cut my hair until the election, and if America does not have the good sense to elect a Republican, I will spend the subsequent four years growing white-guy dreadlocks.

Even at the late hour, security is sickening. Perhaps not surprisingly for a man whose support rating is hovering around 25%, the man is absolutely petrified at the prospect of buying the Big Ticket, even now when he’s surrounded by legions of the only people in the free world who think he’s still doing a bang-up job. But then again, Bush has always been a chickenshit: back in 2000, when Al Gore was running for the presidency, he acted as Grand Marshal of the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day parade. He was nervous – and why not? The streets were lined with drunks, criminals, psychos and disenfranchised Republicans. But he walked it all the way, gladhanding with ruffians like myself who were, after all, going to put him in the White House. When Bush acted as Grand Marshal of the same parade a few years later, having somehow achieved the office of the Presidency through nefarious means, he spent the whole route waving irritably from the back of an armored SUV.

Finally, at around 7:20 AM – after five hours of being patted down by earpieced hulks, surfing YouPorn, and trying to get a card game up with some of the sad sacks from the ACLU who have been forced to work this gig – Mr. President Man finally took the stage. In person, he looks a little haggard and tired: no legacy to speak of, no friends overseas (whither Pooty-Poot? a nation turns its starving eyes to you), and another fucking boatload of corpses to go and frown at later today. He won’t last as long as his old man once he’s out of office: with no one to stand in the way of, with no one to infuriate, with no press hanging over his shoulder for him to mutter “fuck off” at, he’ll wither away and disappear, just another burnout boomer with prostate cancer and no hobbies. The chant begins before he even hits the walkway: “FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!” I look around for a copy of the Constitution, but no one seems to have brought one.

He starts out a little bleary – I can dig it, man – but on an oddly touching human moment, talking about his daughter’s upcoming marriage. But just in case we might get the mistaken impression that he has a functioning human brain that works in a normal fashion, he goes on to say that “Dick Cheney is the greatest vice-president in the history of the United States”. Then again, maybe he’s got some chip implanted in his incisor that makes him say that whenever Cheney’s name gets mentioned, like when someone asked Frank Sinatra about Raymond Shaw. His administration “didn’t seek the approval of editorialists” before deciding what to do – take that, Matt Taibbi! – and “we darned sure didn’t seen permission from groups like Code Pink and MoveOn before taking action”. Take that, mothers of dead soldiers! But what’s with this ‘darned’ shit? Even Cheney said ‘damn’. Act like he’s afraid to say the motherfuckin’ F-word.

“Since I took office,” says the former cocaine addict, “the overall use of drugs by young people has dropped off by 24%.” Hey, he brought it up, not me. This gets a lot more applause than his next bit, where he spiels about fiscal discipline and everyone wonders who the fuck he thinks he’s talking to. Next, though, is the hottest little button of all, when he says that “human life is precious, and deserves to be protected”, as long as we aren’t talking about the life of towelheads or criminals or people who are dumb enough to live in a place that flood occasionally. The war spiel comes next, because even this dumb bastard knows that no one’s going to offer up any catcalls about the jackass war. “Afghanistan will never again be a safe haven for terrorists who wish to do us harm,” he claims, using a strange interpretation of “never again” which apparently means “at some point in the future”, since the last I heard the heirs to the Taliban were pretty much running roughshod over the joint. He offers up a little bit that’s calculated to make my blood pressure shoot up to Throbsville: he intends to sign an executive order that will force the President to explain wasteful and unaccountable spending. How fortunate that this doesn’t apply to him, and the vast financial sinkhole that Iraq has become. No fear, though: “When the history of this period is written,” says Mr. I Can Has Legacy?, “it will show that we were right.”

As of today, says the worst president in American history, “25 million Iraqis are free”. A million more are beyond freedom, knowing what the dead know. At the final moment, he does what we all knew he would do: he gives John McCain the most tepid, most damaging endorsement imaginable, saying only that he hopes the crowd will support the Republican nominee for President. I’m tired and sick and burned, and I need to eat and I need to get away from all the choking self-satisfaction in the room. The whole place rises as one, roaring and chanting, calling for a repeal to the Constitution so this luckless bastard, so desperate to get the hell out of a job he never wanted to begin with and only took out of spite; and Bush stands there, holding a dripping knife – the only tool he’s ever used – just another misbegotten Mark Antony, waiting for the cheers of the crowd to

Tagged as: bush, cheney, cpac

Mister Leonard Pierce is a blogger for Sadly No!