Is there any doubt The Washington Post is a liberal paper? Three weeks back, the Post announced a contest asking readers to write an amusing first paragraph of Dick Cheney’s memoirs, since he was signed by the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. (This game wasn't played with Bill or Hillary Clinton.) On Sunday, the Post published 28 phony introductions: "we challenged readers to propose a first paragraph for the former veep's book. Culling the several hundred entries was, needless to say, a torturous process. Today we present some of our favorite renditions."

The Post splayed the entries across two entire pages in the Style & Arts section, but they are not online. A few were humorous (one was mostly redacted), but many were nasty, like one that began: "The day that the planes hit the tower, I could not help but be carried back to the first time my mother helped me eat the heart of a bear." Some were brief:

Unaccustomed as I am to the truth... -- R. Deierlein, White Plains, N.Y.

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa! As for the rest? Mere history. Let the retelling begin. -- Pete Weitzel, Washington

Jan. 20, 2001: Things to do. 1) Convince W that he can really, really be a Jedi knight, if he is loyal & always listens to the Jedi master. -- Joe Bartl, Toronto and Kandahar

Well, I appear to have gotten away with most of it. -- Steve Chandler

Story Continues Below Ad ↓

My bad. -- Susan Wenger, Montgomery Village

This was the very first lame entry on the Post's "Best-Tellers List":

I rack my brain whenever I search for the first sentence of anything I am composing. This thoughtful approach guided me as I sought a way to begin this memoir. I showed what I had written to Lynne. She immediately drew a big delete mark through my first two words and admonished me to get rid of "I rack." I replied, "I did." -- Marla Peterson, Knoxville, Tenn.

One writer imagined Cheney was incredibly arrogant about being right:

I'm gonna tell the complete, unabridged story of my life, and I am saying from the start that I was always right. I was born right, right from the start. I always got it right even if nobody else did. Regardless of popular opinion, which I consider worthless, I always was, am, and will be right. As any [expletive] fool knows, might makes right, and I've had plenty of might. That makes me mighty right. Now for the details: -- Patricia Collier, Annapolis

Several entrants imagined Cheney thinking he was God, or the instrument of God’s wrath:

In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And my Spirit moved upon the face of the waters. And I said, "Let there be light": and there was light. -- Stephan Spitzer, Brookeville

From my desk in the White House, I watched the Twin Towers collapse on September 11th, 2001. I watched the Pentagon smoldering with flames. From that moment, I knew that I would be the punishment of God. If they committed great sins upon my country, God would send a punishment like me upon them. I was transformed by that moment: my greatest ambition was to scatter my enemies, to drive them into caves, to see their cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love them shrouded in tears, and to gather into my prisons their wives and daughters. In this memoir of my greatest years of public service, I hope to give you my anger, that it may abound, until all enemy noncombatants have been vanquished. -- J.P. Antona, Tampa

Others imagined that Cheney welcomed 9/11 as an exhilarating occasion:

No one can know what it felt like to be in charge that day -- when in the sunlight of that not yet crisp September morning we changed as a country and in a very real way we entered adulthood. There was an exhilaration I felt born from a smoldering Pentagon and from the ruins of the World Trade Center, an excitement created from adversity heightened exponentially. Everything I have done in my public life over the last forty years has led me, I believe, inexorably to that terrific September morning. To be in charge was to drink from the cup of quiet rage on that monumental day. And everything in my life has led me to be in charge. -- Tony Cormier, New York

Stephen Stark of Springfield, Virginia couldn't just mock Cheney, but also presented his mother as a savage. It doesn't reflect well on his own parents:  

The day that the planes hit the tower, I could not help but be carried back to the first time my mother helped me eat the heart of a bear. I must have been three or four at the time, and my mother had leapt on the bear and rendered it unconscious with several blows from a large rock. It was a grizzly. I was fondling my favorite Perazzi Brescia over/under 28-gauge shotgun when she came in under the rock where we lived at the time and said to me, "Dick. It's time for you to learn what it means to be a man." I put aside my gun and followed her out into the bright light, and there was the bear, its head misshapen from her many blows. She handed me a bone knife that she had fashioned herself from the antler of a prehistoric elk, and commanded me to penetrate the animal with it, just below the throat. I whimpered. I had never killed anything larger than a man before [at three or four years old!]. She slapped me with a bloody hand, then closed her hand around mine and the knife. Together we raised our arms and plunged the knife through the bear's sternum. It gave a muffled cry as rivers of blood coursed from it. With her skillful, four-inch claws, my mother parted the ribcage of the beast and removed the still-beating heart. "Take," she said. "Eat." And that day, as the planes crashed, I thought of that knife plunging into the bear. I remembered the lesson of the flavor of its still-warm blood on my lips, and I knew that we would have to rip the still-beating heart out of the beast who had done this to us, and eat it, or we would not be men. -- Stephen Stark, Springfield

Larry Gordon of Falls Church imagined that Cheney conspired to get Monica Lewinsky a White House internship, since Karl Rove's election ideas were "crude and juvenile."

Passages like these ought to succeed in convincing people that allegedly empathetic and compassionate liberals can manage some hate of their own. It certainly drives home the point that the Post is published by liberals, for liberals.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.