Gene Weingarten, the former editor of the Washington Post's Style section who's now their Sunday "humorist," has naturally returned to the scene of his completely typical liberal hatred of Dick Cheney. For Sunday's Post Magazine, Weingarten pretended to write a rave review of Cheney's memoir In My Time, since "conservatives predicted we in the liberal media would unfairly savage it. Supposedly, we harbor some deep, almost deranged antipathy toward the loathsome former vice president." He then reminded readers of his hatred:
Two years ago, when the news first broke that Mr. Cheney had a book contract, this reporter speculated that the former vice president would demand payment in the form of “a gunnysack filled with unblemished human heads.” It turns out this was completely wrong, and I regret the error. As Mr. Cheney makes clear in the acknowledgments, he was paid in the severed heads of the last 700 remaining East African mountain gorillas.
This is how his fake-review began:
In this surprisingly intimate memoir, Mr. Cheney reveals a personal warmth that will take many of his carping critics by surprise. Who could fail to be moved by his description of his worries, as a father-to-be, that his newborn daughter would inherit his genes and have to face, as he did, the painful ordeal of horn-removal surgery?
In a similar vein, Cheney finally puts to rest the persistent rumor that, while himself in utero, he ate his twin brother to eliminate a competitor. Mr. Cheney admits the unusual infanti-fratricide but says he believed at the time — and still does — that his womb-mate had “all the earmarks of a terrorist sympathizer.”
He also suggested:
Though a rock-ribbed social conservative, Mr. Cheney has refreshingly charitable words for marginalized minorities, urging greater compassion for, and better integration into our society of, “those all-too-misunderstood groups such as the Undead and those with faith-based allegiance to Lucifer, Harvester of Souls.”
This isn't going to be funny to anyone who doesn't share Mr. Weingarten's very dark view of Cheney.