TakeYourMedicine

I'm starting to develop a small, tasteful crush on Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

In my little world, a crush is an expression of sensibility, and Justice Souter is turning out to be my kind of guy, Constitutionally speaking. So don't expect me to go to DC to stalk him and try to jump his bones. We're talking principle here.

First there was that flap with the Chief Justice over the red herring Roberts was attempting to insert into the argument in Georgia v Randolph. Now there's the whole question of habeas corpus under discussion as the justices discuss the challenge to the Bush Administration's plan to try Osama's former driver before a military commission.

Now for those of you who haven't developed an addiction to Law and Order and its myriad spinoffs, habeas corpus is fundamental to the law. Loosely translated as "you gotta da body?" it refers to a standard for confining someone for probable transgressions against us the people. No compelling evidence, no incarceration.

The case now before the court wants to hold Salim Ahmed Hamdan on charges of conspiracy. Congress has supposedly taken the case out of the track to the Court, and to federal courts in general. They want to use a military commission, which does not afford defendents the same protections as civilian defendants enjoy. Only, whoops--military law doesn't do conspiracy. Conspiracy is not recognized as a war crime. Federal courts, the Administration and its lackey Congress have argued, have no jurisdiction in the matter.

Solicitor General Paul Clement wants to have it both ways: to treat Hamdan as an enemy combatant and therefore use the military commission format, and to try him for an offense not recognized by the military... and to get away with it by keeping the case out of the Court's purview.

As the Court sorted through whether or not to assert its jurisdiction over the matter, Souter questioned Clement on whether Congress' removal of the federal courts' jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from detainees at Guantanimo amounted to suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

What's the big deal about suspending habeas corpus? It's limited to "cases of rebellion or invasion" in the Constitution. It's the means by which prisoners can go to court to challenge the lawfulness of their confinement. Suspending habeas corpus is therefore a legally drastic step.

Of course, the Bush Administration considers provisions of the Constitution simply to be obstacles, not legal constraints. Solicitor Clements therefore replied that if habeas corpus had been suspended, Congress had simply "stumbled upon a suspension of the writ..." given the "exigencies of 9/11."

Souter (becoming Constitutionally hunkier by the nanosecond) admonished Clements for implying that Congress might be permitted to suspend habeas corpus "inadvertently."

Clements replied, "I think at least if you're talking about the extension of the writ to enemy combatants held outside the territory of the United States--"

"Now wait a minute!" Stud-Muffin Souter interrupted him. "The writ is the writ. There are not two writs of habeas corpus, for some cases and for other cases. The rights that may be asserted, the rights that may be vindicated, will vary with the circumstances, but jurisdiction over habeas corpus is jurisdiction over habeas corpus."

I apologize to David Souter. I thought he was a wimp when Poppy Bush nominated him. Guilt by association. In fact, I think he's smart, and adorable, too.

Let's hope he's taking his vitamins. We need him.

The President introduced his new chief of staff Joshua Bolten (right) today, promising the public that the change represented a shake-up designed to answer concerns about the operational style of the Oval Office. He is replacing Andrew Card (left).

"They are both patriots; they are dedicated to America and its promise, but they couldn't be more dissimular in style and approach," Mr. Bush declared. "I expect to regain the trust and confidence of the American people through this change."

Critics had urged Bush to bring in outsiders to revitalize a close-knit White House plagued by a slew of political problems from the belated response to Hurricane Katrina to the handling of the Iraq war.

"I have gone to the heart of the administration, to its nuculus, really, to bring a fresh point of view to the day-to-day operations of the Oval Office."

Bolten had a mouth full of grass and was unable to answer reporters' questions.

Another over-reaction to a gesture without which traffic could not flow every day:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia startled reporters in Boston just minutes after attending a mass, by flipping a middle finger to his critics.

A Boston Herald reporter asked the 70-year-old conservative Roman Catholic if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state.

You know what I say to those people? Scalia replied, making the obscene gesture and explaining That's Sicilian.

The 20-year veteran of the high court was caught making the gesture by a photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston's newspaper . Don't publish that, Scalia told the photographer, the Herald said.

Hmph... are we being a little overly sensitive here? Ever since my special fella The Dick told my senator Patrick Leahy to fuck off, we've been agog at the Republican propensity for naughty words. My own very good friend Karen Zipdrive lashed out at Dubya for flipping a perfectly good birdie, the object of which escapes me now.

I say that this is the opportunity of a lifetime: pottymouth politicians, letting it all rip. Let those pious souls who think that they are represented by their faith-based fellows get a good look and listen to these sanctimonious saps. Rick Santorum admitting that he doesn't give a flying fuck about the just-born, only the unborn! Bill Frist admitting that he doesn't know shit about medicine or politics, he just wants to be the biggest dong on the block! Bush and Cheney talking about living simply to suck the corporate big one! Yow!

How refreshing it would be.

Of course, the Dems would have to do something besides pretend to be shocked. They'd just have to mutter, "Oh, you know how Dubya gets," or some other disclaimer, refusing to getting sucked into the dialogue. Nobody really likes sanctimony on the subject of obscenity, except for those who really don't use such language. The rest of us should just shrug and stay silent.

Think of political discourse as just one more form of navigating the rocky highways of statehood. Could you ever drive if you didn't have a near-universal gesture for when some asshole cuts you off?

Let's let the Republicans be Republicans, for all the world to see and hear.

Now that the Patriot Act is once again law, it's interesting to note that there is one U.S. citizen who has decided that he doesn't need to obey it.

You guessed it: George W. Bush.

After the grand signing ceremony that reauthorized the act March 9, the White House issued a signing statement saying that Bush did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI would be using its expanded police powers.

Bush has decided that he can withhold the information if he believes that disclosure will "impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Members of Congress have been less than pleased with Bush's latest maneuver. Apparently the oversight provisions that Bush has chosen to ignore were negotiated to make the bill more acceptable to those who were concerned that the FBI not abuse its powers to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Sen. Patrick Leahy tried to call Bush on his latest shell game by inserting an objection into the record of the Judiciary Committee, but the press wasn't interested.

I'm sure the press has developed great respect for the incredible sensitivity of the deliberative process under this executive branch.

In perhaps the boldest move of his presidency, George W. Bush appointed his vice president, Dick Cheney, to the Supreme Court, replacing Justice David Souter, whom he kicked off the bench for "the high crime" of sassing Chief Justice John Roberts.

"This is a dream come true. I've always wanted to co-opt the judicial branch," an ecstatic Cheney gushed to the press. His confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to sail through. Democratic opposition, while strident, is expected to be ineffectual.

Bush's move was sparked by reports that Souter had "dissed" Roberts as they wrote conflicting opinions on Georgia v Randolph No. 04-1067, which argued the question of police entering a home without a search warrant and over the objections of one of the residents. Souter, writing for the majority, accused Roberts of raising a "red herring" over the question of whether or not requiring the police to obtain a warrant to search for cocaine would impede their ability to protect victims of domestic violence.

"That was low," declared the president. "They hadn't even been talking about fishin', fresh or salt water. In these times of threat to our national security we can't have our justices arguing. They've got to agree. We got to have people who will pull together for America."

Bush discussed the matter with Cheney, and the two began an intensive search for Souter's replacement. After several minutes of what insiders called "agonizing" deliberation, Cheney nominated himself.

Cheney is expected to be confirmed in time for the cases involving the purported "imperialism" of the Executive Branch.

The State Department has been abuzz about the "new" Condoleezza Rice who returned from a recent whirlwind trip that included several stops in South America.

"I can't believe she's the same woman," remarked one aide. "She's so... bubbly."

Staff members who traveled with her say that the big change came in Bolivia when President Evo Morales presented her with a charango, a native instrument which looks like a cross between a ukulele and a mandolin. The Secretary, an accomplished musician, was captivated by the gift, which featured real coca leaves as part of the ornamentation. While U.S. officials were checking on whether or not Ms. Rice could bring the instrument into the United States, the Secretary slipped it into her diplomatic pouch, which she guarded zealously for the rest of her journey.

Since returning to Washington, Ms Rice has adopted a new style. "She wants me to call her Condi-ho. She sits on my desk and giggles and asks me go shopping in Little Havana. How'm I supposed to respond to that? Do you think I should go?" wondered a member of the secretarial pool.

Ms. Rice's constant companion is the diplomatic pouch, to which she has added other items in addition to the charango. She wants to "jam" in Cabinet meetings. She has asked Morales to supply her with an instructor.

"She's determined to master this instrument," remarked an aide. "Her intensity would be frightening if she weren't so damned happy all the time."

In response to recent Bush Dynasty chatter President Bush has slipped away for a series of crown jewel fittings.

Piggybacking on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's shoe shopping excursions, the President has been glimpsed at Cartier's and Tiffany's, looking for the headgear that will add to his mystique.

Rumor has it that Bush's shopping has been serving double purposes-- he has also doing a little advance Rapture shopping, since when Christ returns to earth, the righteous will be fitted with golden crowns before they are swept to glory. "He wanted to have a chance to try on a couple for size before the big day," one insider confided.

Bush has not decided whether to bequeath the presidency to Jenna or Barbara, should the Rapture be unexpectedly delayed.

Sometimes it seems that 9/11 was just made for the Bush Administration. In those summer days before, the President stuck extra close to home in Crawford, Texas, uncertain what mark to make with his newly gained powers. He'd come to office with a reputation for doing best with only one or two items on his agenda, then hammering at them again and again for maximum effect.

Then the planes hit the towers, and the Bush presidency was born. After the preliminary My Pet Goat dithering at the elementary school that we see in Fahrenheit 911, Bush eventually wound up at the site of the disasters and issued the rallying cry that, for the moment, pulled the nation together and gave the two major political parties the illusion of shared purpose.

It was nice while it lasted. Unfortunately, the politicking had already begun. The freshly created Department of Homeland Security with cabinet-level status had actually been a suggestion from the Rudman-Hart Commission, the warnings on Al Qaeda an emphasis laid down by Bill Clinton, not the neglect that the Bushies allowed us to believe. Along came the Patriot Act, the rounding up of thousands of Arab-Americans, all accepted by some pretty frightened American people. Remember the anthrax scare?

We were putty in their paws, Bush's and Cheney's. Suddenly, all the rules had changed.

At the time, I was teaching Arthur Miller's The Crucible. It was bizarre to hear echoes of the rationalizations of the Salem witch hunters on the CBS Evening News, issuing forth from members of Congress. Civil liberties too dangerous for this new time? Dump them! Rather than proving the guilt in the courts, the onus now rested upon the suspect, and everyone who wasn't standing with the President was suspect.

The Bush Administration now had pretext for its penchant for secrecy: national security. Now it was all about protecting the nation from terror, with that kaliedoscope of color to remind us that even as we attempted to go about our daily business, the government was throwing our sense of safety against a spectrum. This new "war" on terror, with the President as Commander in Chief, justified any secret the administration wanted to keep, whether for the common good, or not. Suddenly the debate on policy turned one-sided, as if only one party held the keys to our well being. We were being terrorized with the threat of terror by our own executive branch. We fell for it; Congress fell for it.

The secrecy of the administration was and is toxic, John Dean has amply shown. Among the criticisms that Dean levels against excessive secrecy are these:

--Secrecy is undemocratic. Our system is based upon formed citizens being aware of our leaders' actions and intentions, so that we can express our consent or dissent. Withholding information deprives us of the foundation of our liberty. "Democracies die behind closed doors," said an appeals judge to the administration not long ago.

--Secrecy precludes public accountability. We aren't in a position to know whether or leaders are serving the public good or a narrow political agenda.

--Secrecy alienates. It's easy to hatch a thousand conspiracy theories when we don't have the facts. Alienation leads to distrust of government, which can hinder the active involvement needed in a democracy.

--Secrecy encourages incompetence. When mistakes are easy to conceal, the people in power have no reason to exercise caution. This dynamic can lead to greater risks more sloppily executed, resulting in greater dangers to the public.

There are more. Dean published Worse than Watergate two years ago, detailing the manner in which the executive branch has withheld vital information from other branches of government for political rather than military ends. The administration continues to violate the very Constitution that it swore to defend. Unfortunately, as I write this Russ Feingold is pushing in vain for Senate censure of Bush for his role in breaking the laws on spying on citizens. His fellow Democrats are fearful of being thought of as soft on terrorism and aren't backing him up.

The imperial presidency continues unabated. To what unforeseen end?

Still looking a little woozy from the anesthesia, Vice President Dick Cheney was upbeat after undergoing 18 hours of major surgery to remove his pudgy body from his head.

Concerned about the deteriorating condition of Cheney's heart and circulatory system, the Bush Administration decided to take a major donor up on his offer and transplant an entire body onto the ailing vice president's head. The body was salvaged from a recent street battle in Fallujah.

Speaking upon conditions of anonymity, a hospital employee described the condition of Cheney's discarded heart. "Far from looking worn and diseased, it looked as if it had never been used."

Cheney will rest in an undisclosed location while he adjusts to his new testosterone levels.

The Bush Administration was forced to waive groundwater purity regulations near the Potomac in order to dispose of Cheney's former frame.

According to John Dean, the Bush Administration was given extensive briefings on the threat that Al Qaeda posed to the nation. During a transition meeting December 19, 2000, Bill Clinton told Bush that his biggest national security problems would come from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, set up 10 security briefings for Condoleeza Rice.

After the inauguration, Bush and Cheney received the bipartisan report commissioned by Clinton's Defense Secretary, William Cohen, of a multiyear study of national security problems likely to confront the nation. Chaired by two former senators familiar with military and national security issues, Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, the report, released Jan. 31, 2001, urged the administration to focus on terrorism as its first priority.

Cheney told Bush to turn the project over to him and closed down the Rudman-Hart Commission. In May of 2001 Bush told the nation, "Some non-state terrorist troups have. . . demonstrated an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction. . . It is clear that the threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons being used against the United States --while not immediate-- is very real." Cheney's recommendations were to create an Office of National Preparedness in FEMA, a move that killed the Rudman-Hart commission's recommendation to create a homeland security department with cabinet rank (a plan that the White House claimed as its own after 9/11.) The Bush Administration, allergic to all ideas emanating from the Clinton Administration, had blown off its most urgent counsel.

Once 9/11 became part of U.S. history, the need to analyze what and how it had happened came back to haunt the Bush Administration. With Democrats then in control of the Senate, the White House, realizing that it could exert only partial over Congress, attempted to work only with House and Senate intelligence committees, whose meetings and records were generally kept secret. Cheney told then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that "a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism." Cheney finessed the combining of the House and Senate committees, knowing that an overloaded group would function less effectively, reducing the time for questioning witnesses and depleting staff support. Since all the information needed was controlled by the White House, the administration was in a position to pick and choose what information it would release to the committee.

The intent of the Bush Administration became even clearer when it refused to allow Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Colin Powell to testify on matters relating to pre-9/11 counterterrorism activities.

Only the pressure from the families of the victims of 9/11 pushed the inquiry onto center stage, and again in the face of resistance from Bush-Cheney. They relented when they secured the power to pick the commission chair, first Henry Kissinger, who resigned with conflicts of interest, and then former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, who had no experience with national security. Through him they were further able to pack the staff with White House favorites in order to control the focus of the commission.

Once formed, according to Dean, the commission had to deal regularly with the distractions of White House stalling and negotiating, further blurring its focus. Given a little room in the White House to perform its tasks, commission members were not allowed to take even their notes home with them in order to review them.

By increasing the wear and tear on members of the commission, the administration would be able to maintain its distance from blame. By forcing the bipartisan committee to put its energy into the "roots" of terrorism, it could shift the blame to the Clinton Administration.

Clearly, it wasn't going to credit Clinton with sounding the first warning note.

Next: the cover of terror

According to John Dean in Worse than Watergate: the Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, the current administration's penchent for secrecy comes in large part from an agenda defined by Cheney's neoconservative values. The American people have believed that they were getting a moderately conservative Bush-Cheney administration, (that's where compassionate conservatism comes in handy) and that 9/11 forced a sharper turn to the right to accommodate the need for tighter security.

In fact, 9/11 was just what the administration needed as a pretext for the values that it had kept in the background (like Cheney himself) while Bush went around jollying it up with the public, pressing the flesh and coining his signature nicknames. In his literal and figurative bunker, Cheney created a shadow national security council of his own advisers, according to Dean, beyond the reach of Congress. With Cheney's powerful role in the administration (given Dubya's intellectual laziness, isolation, and comfort with having others do his work for him) Cheney and his fellow neocons are free to press their policies on the rest of us. Their policies are based upon the following assumptions (there are more in the Dean book; I condense here):

--They believe in a powerful federal government;
--They believe that the end justifies the means in politics, that hardball in politics is a moral necessity;
--They believe lying is necessary for the state to survive;
--They believe certain facts should be known only by the political elite and withheld from the general public;
--They believe in preemptive war and the naked use of military force to achieve any desired ends;
--They openly endorse the idea of an American empire and unapologetically call for imperialism;
--They are willing to use force to impose American ideals (or at least their version of them);
--They believe 9/11 resulted from a lack of foreign entanglements, not from too many of them;
--They are willing to redraw the map of the Middle East by force while unconditionally supporting Israel;
--They view civil liberties with suspicion, as unnecessary restrictions on the federal government;
--They dismiss any arguments based on constitutional grounds.

In the next blog we'll look at how these values and the neocons' contempt for anything from the Clinton Administration combined to turn Cheney away from pursuing the very sort of activity that might well have prevented 9/11.

The trouble with an administration that panders to the religious right is that it emboldens all the slimey little bigots in smaller power positions to perform equally nasty work. Thus under Ronald Reagan the Ku Klux Klan was emboldened to burn churches, and under George W. Bush the moral pipsqueaks have expelled Brandon Flyte from West Linn High School.

His offense? Showing a video he'd made for a senior English project to a class after being told to remove a scene of two young men snuggling in bed, bare chested. The administration ordered him to remove the scene, but he showed it, anyway, only not to the English class, but to members of an interested science class.

In the manner of weasels everywhere, the administration hasn't actually expelled Brandon; it has taken the slimy route of the "mandatory transfer" to a local community college.

Ultimately, Brandon may be happier in a college setting, but West Linn High School is the poorer for its loss of someone who is willing to take a compassionate stand on an issue that brings so much pain --and potential danger-- to high school students. The old argument, that students shouldn't be exposed to such issues, in this day of the Rainbow Party and other extracurricular pursuits, is ludicrous.

Even if the adults don't get it, the students often do.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney have sealed a pact with a South Korean political and spiritual leader for a new power base in the event that the effort to impeach them is successful.

Since both are known to have lied to Congress and the American people on multiple occasions, Bush and Cheney will need to shift their power base to an offshore location. The two have long admired the melding of faith and politics that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon has crafted and would enjoy performing a few mass weddings of their own, all of them heterosexual.

The Rev. Moon and his wife, tired of the responsibilities of mass manipulation, will buy a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles.

I've been reading John Dean's Worse than Watergate: the Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. It's not a laugh a minute, but as Ecclesiastes tells us, there's a time for every purpose under heaven.

Dean, for those of you too young or too far gone to remember, was White House Counsel to Richard Nixon. He was a whistleblower who first warned Nixon that there was a "cancer on the presidency," i.e., the stonewalling that followed the Watergate break-in, and a star witness at the Watergate hearings for what went on in the White House as Nixon's palace guard tried to contain the damage.

Worse than Watergate is a valuable book, since Dean knows both the White House and the law from an insider's perspective. The account is rich in the law that should govern the relationships between the Executive and Legislative branches and the ways in which the Bush-Cheney team has undermined the Constitutionally proscribed balance of power. If left unchecked, this presidency will continue to destroy not only the principles that have kept this country on the track of continuous improvement (occasional burps of fear and meanness aside), but will turn the writing of presidential history into the sort of farce that we associate with totalitarian regimes.

Let's start with history. Bush and his henchman Cheney have moved to remove their actions from the public record. The first move, following Bush's so-called "election" in 2000 was to make his gubanatorial records from Texas inaccessible by hiding them in the archives of his father's presidential library, thus federalizing them and placing them out of the control of the state of Texas, which has strong public information laws. By the time the brave Peggy Rudd of the Texas State Library fought the case to its legal conclusion, Bush's hand-picked successor, Gov. Rick Perry, found new exceptions in the state's information laws that, according to Dean, "give him the keys to the filing cabinets with Bush's records." The records are being processed--slowly.

A few documents were reviewed before Perry restored the stone wall, most notably the cavalier treatment that Bush and counsel Alberto Gonzales reviewed death row commutations on incomplete information with zap speed. Bush's legendary laziness and "decisiveness" combined for the quick dispatch of the condemned. No wonder he's so casual about sending our young men and women off to die in Iraq. This pro-life president's interest in sacred matters ends at birth.

Dean further describes the "shrink-wrapping of the White House." He covers some ground with which most of us are familiar: the image control, the manipulation of the news media, the invocation and inflation of executive privilege. The big, nasty surprise is the sealing of Presidential records. In 2001, while the country united in post-9/11 vulnerability, Bush gutted the 1978 Presidential Records Act with an executive order that includes the following provisions:

Former presidents can keep their papers sealed indefinitely.

Vice presidents have the authority to invoke executive privilege. (!!!)

The burden shifts from the former presidents seeking to withhold their papers to the person seeking presidential papers, to show justification why that person should have access to them.

Any request for access to a former president's papers must be approved by both the former president and the incumbent president, and if the former president objects to the release, the incumbent president --even if he disagrees-- will authorize his Justice Department to protect the former president's objection.

"Representatives of former presidents" may invoke executive privilege after a former president is dead. Although there is no constitutional basis for this, under Bush's order this right can be passed from generation to generation, to friends, to anyone.

Dean's book should be required reading for anyone concerned with making the case for impeachment, or at least embarrassing elected representatives and future candidates into reversing some of the damage that this administration has done. I will be including more nuggets from Dean's exhaustive research in my upcoming postings.

It's better to be crabby and informed than perky and constitutionally undermined.

Standing by her man, Second Lady Lynne Cheney is lending her talents to the Dick's new role in adding to the quality of life of a Wal*Mart associate.

"Once the Dick donned the Bag, I knew that I had to pitch in and make a statement for the empowerment of women," La Belle Cheney declared.

In addition to her inspirational role to the women associates of Wal*Mart, Mrs. Cheney is negotiating a signature line of apparel for the chain. Featuring her own designs, the ensembles will be stitched by Burmese political prisoners working 20-hour days.

It's all happened so quickly.

It seems like only yesterday that James Watt was bouncing her on his knee and telling her that the impending Rapture was her permission slip for selling out the environment, that she was actually hastening the joyful reunion between God and man by tossing ecological protections out the window.

Well, hell... the Rapture stuff plays well in the Bible Belt, doesn't it? Dubya has been no less tender in a secular tenor:

Bush called Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, a strong advocate for "the wise use and protection of our nation's natural resources."

"When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast region, she played a leading role in my administration's efforts to restore badly needed offshore energy production," he said.

Help me out here... I'm chokin'!

Oh, I know there'll be other land rapists, but I'm like the kid who just lost her dog. I don't want another puppy. The way she handed out drilling permits (they increased 70 per cent in her first three years) was...well... special. When she relaxed environmental standards after Katrina, she did it ... oh, it's so hard to explain. Let's just say that her footprints will linger upon the land.

Yeah, that's it.

In a stunning coup, retail giant Wal*Mart has retained the services of Vice President Dick Cheney in its new public relations campaign which will restore the reputation of the embattled firm. Cheney will not only lend the credibility of his office to Wal*Mart, he will serve as a creative consultant as well.

"I hope to do for Wal*Mart what I have done for the country," Cheney declared.

Cheney has wasted no time. In a bold move he has done away with the traditional Wal*Mart vest, replacing it with the version he is modeling here.

"With the savings from this simple fashion update, Wal*Mart will be in a position to improve its healthcare offerings to employees.

Savings will go to the Wal*Mart health employee plan, which will provide each associate with a Care Bag filled with wellness aids, such as Flintstone's Chewable Vitamins, rubbing alcohol, Equate aspirin, and antibacterial towlettes.

Our favorite Dick dropped off the radar screen for a couple of days, but at last we've found him again, kicking up a little dust on a decidedly early spring break.

"Dick is definitely up to party," proclaimed Janey Winterbottom, Dick's pal in the photo. "I can't believe how many Long Island iced teas the guy can hold without puking."

Fortunately, Dick's current political might provides him with a driver, so those DUIs aren't piling up anymore. And he is going around town unarmed, to the relief of his fellow revelers.

"We just want to get his boss to join us, too... I want my very own nickname," said Winterbottom. "He's also got the keys to Dick's handcuffs."

According to Cheney, "I have no boss."

"That aftershave! You're sweeter than the desert breezes at sunset."

"Cain't wait to get you out to the bunkhouse. Whatcha got under those skirts, hmm?"

"Hmmmm. Want to find out?"

"'D'ja bring the lubes?"

"I'll always bring the lubes."

"Mmmmmm. Let me hear you say forever. Even if we can't marry. Say it again, that you'll always bring the lubes."

"Marriage is too base for what we have. I will always bring the lubes. And I will ride you like a camel in a sandstorm!"

"I wish I knew how to quit you!"

"You will never quit me. You will never know how."

Our Dick Du Jour finds himself at Bide-a-Baby-Bear Day Care for juice and naptime. It's been a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad week. Brownie's telling! Maybe Scooter's lawyer is gonna tell!

Dickie is cross and sleepy.

Sleep, my little Dick.

Okay, folks, a little shocker... something that'll knock The Da Vinci Code right off the best seller list... this is bigger than Jesus and the Magdalene!

The Bin Laden thing? Totally made up, a little Rove riff that pitched us all to the floor, the better to gather around Dubya for story time. See, if we united around a common enemy (much better than joining together for shared sacrifice, less is more, and all that other liberal claptrap), we'd be able to take care of lots of important national priorities-- you know, the usual--big ole tax cuts, oil for Jesus, relaxed environmental standards, the imperial presidency... nothin' like being scared shitless for turning into huddled masses who don't give a shit about breathing free...

So here he is, back under deep cover. Dubya having brought up the nasty subject of being determined to capture Bin Laden, old Dick has to don his terror duds and head back to Tora Bora, so that Dubya's minions can round him up. At first Dubya himself was going to snag him, but the guys didn't think they'd be able to keep a straight face. Then Condi was going to make the capture in those badass boots of hers... might be just the thing to propel her to the presidency in '08. Rumsfeld wanted a shot, but there was fear that the troops would rebel, since they all think he's such an asshole.

So we'll just have to see.

Of course, the Dick will be making a great sacrifice to his country: contact lenses. He just hates wearing those things.

You can say that you heard it here first.

What's better than one billionaire standing in for another? And this one comes, not only with a rug (admittedly thinning, but with lots of technical support to keep the combover in place) but with a shiny new wife.

Melania would make a great stand-in second lady. She's used to hanging out with rich men who regularly sport unpleasant facial expressions, and with that bored squint of her own, it might be months before she realizes that The Donald has morphed into The Dick.

The Dick, having married his high school sweetheart and former baton champion of the state of Wyoming, could probably use a little variety. After all, alpha males have to have a little change of camel toes now and then. This variety would be repackaged as the thanks of a grateful nation.

Lynne Cheney could take some time off and write another hot frontier novel with lesbian overtones, or maybe another piece of faux patriotism for the little ones. I'm sure that she could use a change, too. Maybe Jeff Gannon has a few spots open on his dance card.

Okay... it would take a little plastic surgery to carry this one off, since the Dick possesses two chins to Ozzie's one. That aside, this look has much to recommend it: MTV has established the Osbourne image inextricably intertwined with family values, a Republican issue on the platform if not always in practice.

Then there's the outsider thing: metal rockers fall away from the mainstream, as the Dick recently has done. They like the edge of uber-violence, as does the Dick. And this look even comes with a pet! God knows, the Dick could use a friend these days.

Rumor on Penn Avenue is that Dubya is a bit envious of this incarnation; the Dick gets to hang out as the Dub was never fully able to do. And there is the additional cost of plastic surgery. The cost could put the skids on this idea. Additionally, Lynne has put her foot down about the chopper, given the accident-prone nature of the guys in this administration.

It'll be great if this one hits the streets. Alas, it may never make it off the drawing board.