News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
According to the publisher of Dick Cheney’s forthcoming memoir, the former vice president will break his silence and “spill the beans about his hijinks, horseplay and late-night pranks” during eight years in the Bush administration.
“The statute of limitations has expired,” Cheney, 68, has reportedly told associates. “Now the world can meet the man behind the stoic mask — a fun-loving, merry prankster with a twinkle in his eye and a trick up his sleeve.”
While Cheney plans to keep details “hush-hush like Halliburton” until the spring 2011 release of the memoir, rumors have emerged from Cheney confidantes and Facebook friends of his proclivity for light-hearted “gotcha” attacks on his former boss, President George W. Bush.
Revelations reportedly include his surreptitious greasing of the presidential mountain-bike pedals, secretly ordering his chief of staff, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, to load Bush’s iPod with Cheney’s favorite hip-hop hits, and phoning the Oval Office on an encrypted line from his secret bunker to ask the president if the White House refrigerator was running.
“When the president made decisions that I didn’t agree with, I still supported him and didn’t go out and undercut him,” Cheney said, according to Stephen Hayes, his authorized biographer. “But George knew that if he crossed me, I just might sneak up on him in the White House gym and pants him.”
Insiders say the book will paint a picture of a playful Dick Cheney who was “always trying to lighten the mood during the Presidential Daily Briefing or meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
While President Bush reportedly “gave as good as he got” when it came to pranks, Cheney acknowledges that “some of those military, intelligence and national security fellas can’t take a joke.”
