White House vs. whitehouse

John Wooden describes his company, Chickenhead Productions, which runs the parody Web site whitehouse.org, as "a sickening repository of tasteless and self-congratulatory garbage, produced by a detestable clique of New York City losers, who toil needlessly in abject poverty and well-deserved obscurity."

But Wooden, a 31-year-old Web designer and political satirist, has been underselling himself. Late last month, he received a letter from no less an institution than the Office of the Vice President of the United States. The note was not exactly fan mail -- signed by David Addington, Dick Cheney's official counsel, it requested that Wooden take down all of his online references to Cheney's wife, Lynne.

"It is important to avoid using her name and picture for the purposes of trade without her written consent," Addington wrote, citing several legal precedents that purportedly proved his case. "It is also important to avoid portraying her in a false light. Accordingly, I request that you delete the photographs of her and the fictitious biographical statement about her from the Web site."

The letter also suggested that Wooden was breaking federal law by displaying the presidential seal, and that his site's disclaimer that the content was satirical was not obvious enough. "Few people are likely to notice the disclaimer link on the Web page relating to Mrs. Cheney and even fewer are actually likely to click on the link and actually see your disclaimer, so the disclaimer is of little value in making visitors to the Web site aware of the fictitious nature of the Web page," the letter stated.

Most visitors, however, might find it hard to mistake whitehouse.org for anything but parody. The site's current headline is "Secretary Fleischer Delivers Forceful Rebuttal to Charges of Senselessly Dooming Innocent American GIs Purely for Craven Political Gain." (The White House's official site is at whitehouse.gov; whitehouse.com is a porn site.)

Wooden's take on Lynne Cheney, who is the former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the author of several books, is clearly not meant to flatter: "The daughter of a ruggedly masculine sheriff and her demurely erudite husband, Lynne took an early and girlishly appropriate interest in those aspects of American art and culture which are so comfortably reminiscent of 18th century thought and tradition," whitehouse.org says of the vice president's wife.

"Today, Mrs. Dick Cheney is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a non-partisan think tank devoted to improving the plight of average Christian white Americans everywhere. In addition, she serves as director of the Readers Digest Association, where she has been a forceful advocate for the commercial distribution of 'Life in These United States' hardcover compilations."

In a phone interview from Brooklyn, Wooden told Salon that he was very surprised by the letter from the government, but that he wasn't doing anything to change his site.

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So what was your reaction to this letter?

I was pretty shocked. I was totally shocked, in fact, especially inasmuch as the letter contained various completely inaccurate assertions with regard to the use of the presidential seal -- which on the site is a parody seal. I think it would be fair game and utterly legal to use the real seal, but we didn't do that.

More importantly, the thrust of the letter seemed to be that Lynne Cheney is not enough of a public figure to merit parody. And that's completely false -- it's not as if Lynne Cheney is an anonymous, stay-at-home senator spouse. She's had a very active political career as a pundit and lecturer and author. After 9/11 she collaborated on a blacklist of American academics.

And the fact that it was sent from the Office of the Vice President shows that. There's a paradox in their claiming that she's not enough a of a public figure, but sending it from the vice president's office.