The Goat, Or Who Is Cheney?

Cheney and the Goat Devil
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: February 17, 2009

Maureen Dowd loves a show and this weekend she rode the Megabus up to New York for an afternoon at Will Farrell's hit one-man valedictory to our recently departed Texan tinpot.

The audience for the Sunday matinee of “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W Bush” howled in delight.

Everybody loves to psychoanalyze our most dysfunctional and incompetent president of the 21st century and Maureen lets one of the show's writers, expound on the Arrested Development Theory.

“He’s so clearly a neglected 13-year-old that there’s something really kind of heartbreaking about him,” [Adam] McKay said, calling him “a good-time Charlie” who was “just used his whole life to front questionable business endeavors, and in a way that’s what his presidency was.

“He doesn’t have Cheney’s cartoonish need for power and greed that’s so off the charts you don’t even understand how Cheney got that way. W. may have some awareness, deep down inside, sort of like a petulant teenager who just flunked the trig quiz and knows he screwed up. I think Cheney not only knows but is delighted with everything he did, as is Rumsfeld.”

Maureen Dowd prefers the Oedipal Rebellion Theory, which is not entirely in conflict with the ADT.

One of the great mysteries of the Bush presidency is whether W. ever had an epiphany when he realized that he had been manipulated by Dick Cheney, whether it ever hit him that he had trusted the wrong father figure.

And that is the crux of Dubya Administration: What did the President know and when did Dick Cheney tell him?

Cheney as evil overlord and puppet master is such a popular meme that a Google Image search for "Cheney evil" brings up pages of the former Veep photoshopped as various villains or satanic figures. Here is my humble contribution to the genre.

The Will Farrell show also makes that connection:

In the show, the former president dismisses waterboarding as a spa treatment at Bliss, and reveals that he did walk in on Cheney once in the basement of the White House locked in the amorous arms of a giant goat devil in a room full of pentagrams.

“He looked at me with solid silver glowing orb-like eyes, and his breath had a strong ammonia scent to it,” Ferrell’s W. said. “And he told me in a language that I knew in my heart hadn’t been spoken in a thousand years ‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ And I just ran.”

‘Pariff Go Lanerff!’ as far as I can tell is just pidgen-Lovecraft used out of fear of using an actual invocation out of the Necronomicon and summoning Chtulhu or one of the other Ancient Ones now that Cheney has released them from their bidding.

In Maureen's one concession that Dubya may have grown a spine sometime during his reign of error, she uses the rather minor incident of Scooter Libby's (and just having the nickname 'Scooter' should be a criminal offense) pardon, or the lack thereof.

By not pardoning Cheney’s alter ego, who plied his dark arts trying to discredit Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson and then lied to protect his boss, W. was clearly saying he thought that Libby, and by extension Cheney, did something wrong.

But Maureen doesn't go as far as attributing the Dumb-Ass Dauphin with moral clarity as much as pre-adolescent stubborness.

But it’s not clear whether W. is simply pouting because Cheney’s machinations blackened his legacy, or if, at long last, he fathoms the morality of it, that Cheney did hideous things to the Constitution — not to mention that goat devil.

Let's just hope Joe Biden can clear the Naval Observatory from the lingering sulfurous stench of burn-out brimstone.