My memory may be faulty, but wasn’t Dick Cheney a decent enough guy before he went to work as George W. Bush’s VP in 2001?
Not relevant, but my family and I moved to Laramie in 1959. Dad was a captain in the USAF and was sent there to run the ROTC program at the University of Wyoming. I was 13; we stayed until I was 15, when we left for Dad’s next assignment in California. Those years were important ones for me — our early teens are the years we form our first real friendships, and here I was, the only military brat in a new circle of friends, normal kids who all came from Laramie and had never lived anywhere else.
Anyway, I went to summer camp twice while we lived there; I can’t remember the name of the camp but it probably had something to do with the church my family attended, and it was located somewhere north of Laramie. Camp comes to mind because kids from all over Wyoming were there, including Casper, the home of the Cheneys and the Cheney Ranch. Dick Cheney may have been born in Nebraska, but at a very young age moved with his family to Wyoming. He was only five years older than me and I can’t help wondering if I went to summer camp with some of his younger brothers or sisters (presuming he had any and that he hadn’t waterboarded them to death in their sleep). I had a summer camp romance with a girl from Casper (the first summer we held hands; the second summer we graduated to putting our arms around each other), but I remember her name and it wasn’t Cheney.
My only encounter with Dick Cheney himself was in 2004, at Osan Air Base in South Korea. Out of the Air Force a few years by then, working as a defense contractor training USAF aircrews in crew resource management, I was on a teaching swing through Japan and Korea. My fellow instructors and I traveled on government orders giving us general officer status, so when we stayed at military bases they’d put us up in VIP quarters. The VIP quarters at Osan AB were posh single-family homes on a hill overlooking the base (a hill on which the platoon of American soldiers holding it during the Korean War were slaughtered by Chinese forces). One was mine for the week, but two days in Vice President Cheney arrived and they gave me the boot. He got the house and his entourage filled up every other room on base; billeting moved me to a hotel in Suwon and if you’ve ever stayed off-base in Korea you know what a come-down that can be.
All that and I never once saw the man in the flesh. It’s a hell of a thing that the current administration makes Dick Cheney seem not so bad in comparison.
Wednesday was Day #35 of the government shutdown. With some trepidation, I called in a refill to the Davis-Monthan AFB pharmacy, where we get our prescription meds — would it be shut down too? Apparently not; a text message on my phone this morning says come on down and get your stuff. I’m not clear on what is and isn’t shut down. AFAIK our military retirement pay and Social Security are unaffected, at least for now; likewise Medicare, because I went in for an annual wellness check with my doctor last week and no one asked me to pay for it.
Donna and I experienced a couple of brief federal shutdowns during our military career: both times our bank covered the missing paycheck, knowing Uncle Sam was good for it. I hope that’s the case for military members and federal workers today. What’s different today is that so far no resolution is in sight, and Trump’s hinting at not paying furloughed federal workers for involuntary time off. At some point, if the shutdown continues, we’ll all be affected one way or another. And all this to protect well-connected sexual abusers and pedophiles — one in particular.
If I was responsible for the shutdown and in a position to end it — say if I were the president, a congressperson, or a senator — I wouldn’t have to worry about my pay or healthcare. What a deal, huh? I could even vote myself a pay raise, accept a bribe from a lobbyist, or do some insider stock trading to pad my income. And if I wanted to travel over Thanksgiving, should TSA and ATC walkouts and now FAA flight restrictions still be a thing, why, I’d just order me up a Gulfstream from the presidential fleet at Andrews AFB. Fuck all y’all — I got mine, suckers.
The UPS MD-11 crash at Louisville looks to be one of those cases where the worst possible failure, or set of failures, occurred at precisely the worst time; losing an engine right at rotation when it’s too late to abort and the only choice is to continue the takeoff on the remaining engines, one of which may have ingested parts of the first failed engine, all while at or near maximum gross weight, filled with cargo and enough fuel for a nonstop flight to Honolulu. God.
Stay fresh, cheese bags. Hope you’re weathering the storm.