Last week Your W Team was astounded to discover that American propriety has plummeted even lower than we had supposed. It seems a group of miscreants has savaged the image of the inestimable Lynne Cheney, main squeeze to our beloved vice president.
 
You will scarcely credit this, but it appears there are literally hundreds of Internet sites devoted to the denigration of our President and his administration. Worst among these is the scurvy whitehouse.org, which parodies the executive branch site, whitehouse.gov. Last week the scurrilous satire ran altered photos of Ms. Cheney that pictured her as a gap-toothed hillbilly with a red bulb nose. Accompanying these defamations was a mock and mocking biography that tended to cast the Second Lady in a very negative light.
 
If you ask us, the perpetrators of this vile calumny are best advised to obtain asbestos underwear in preparation for their inevitable post-temporal reward.
 
Fortunately their lèse majesté misfired. It turns out the Lynnester is made of pretty stern stuff. She has the skin of a rhinoceros (something that keeps her dermatological team awake nights) and is an old hand at political warfare, having served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, where she made every effort to mitigate what she regarded as an obsessive focus on humanity.
 
You can't help but admire a woman who resolutely stands by whatever principles she may have at any given moment, or, at least, issues a rain check if she is temporarily out.
 
Finally, and most galling to these pixel pirates, La Madama happens to think the suggested makeover is simply darling, and has made it the central element of her fashion statement. It's stunning, and it's taken years off her face and nose.
 
But the soi-disant publishers have been successful in hampering the war effort by distracting the vice president from his mission of dreaming up new, more convincing reasons for the PossibleWar (tm) in Iraq, requiring him instead to threaten legal action against the offending site.
 
Naturally his threats immediately evoked cries of outrage from jerked knees all over the nation, ultimately forcing the Second Banana to blame the whole thing on his legal counsel, David ("Scapegoat Dave") Addington. It seems that Mr. Addington, as is the habit of all salaried employees of rich and powerful men with egos the size of the Taj Mahal, had acted completely autonomously, doing whatever the hell he damned well pleased, without so much as a "mother-may-I" or a by-your-leave to the vice president.
 
Let's face it, the servant problem has just gone to the dogs.
 
Of course there are many that will defend these villains as "heroes," and make all sorts of odious reference to the so-called "Freedom of Speech" amendment precipitately tacked onto the Constitution by our forefathers in their failure to foresee the invention of the Internet.
 
Nice going, be-wigged friends, nice going.
 
The conflation of free speech with heroism, however befuddling it may be to the rational mind, is a common error, and one that recently arose in our own ranks. The word "error" will lead faithful readers of the present journal immediately to suspect that there is somewhere in all this a Feeny in the woodwork, and they will not be disappointed.
 
You will recall that Mrs. Feeny is presently involved in a loathsome study of creative writing, in the course of which the old wrinkle has penned a modern fable, which is reluctantly presented below.
 
 
 
               The Man Who Ran
               by C. Feeny
 
Once there was a man who was a coward. He was afraid of this and that and everything in between. But he feared nothing so much as that others would discover his cowardice.
 
Like many cowards he was incurious and un-bright, and so he saw nothing wrong in masking his timidity and ignorance with a feigned persona of brash self-confidence and aggressive disregard for the feelings of others.
 
He spoke loudly without knowledge and acted quickly without thought, to the point that none could say whether his cowardice made him weak or his weakness made him a coward. But it mattered little because he had a superabundance of both qualities, and with these he led a life of energetic dissipation; his cowardice known only to himself or anyone who spoke to him for a few moments.
 
It was said there was no practice so perverse that he could not master it, and no danger so small that he would not avoid it. In sum, his manner was so big and his mind so small that there was hardly anything to him at all. Were it not for his shoes he would have risen on the breeze and floated away.
 
Then, in an ironic twist of the sort that breeds atheists, the cowardly man became the leader of a great nation--which, under his guidance, and given his character, promptly proceeded to become less great, and less great still, until it was the world's biggest small nation.
 
And when it had grown sufficiently small, its enemies attacked it, causing many innocent people to scream and cry and die, but the cowardly man did none of these, and instead ran away to a place where such things might be held to a minimum. And there he stayed until the screaming and crying and dying had stopped...or at least the screaming and dying part. Then he returned and shook his fist at the departed enemy.
 
But now his worse fear had been realized; everyone knew him for a coward, and he was by many reviled and contemned.
 
But, and here was the odd thing, there was now such great fear of further attack that even though everyone knew what he had done, they nevertheless pretended he was their staunch protector and acclaimed him for the courage they caused themselves to see in him.
 
There are many kinds of cowards.
 
Still, the cowardly man was not satisfied. Despite what the people professed, he knew that he had failed by even his own debased lights, and he desperately sought some accomplishment that would increase his stature if only in his own degenerate regard.
 
So he thought and thought and thought again, and thought some more, but no thought came--until suddenly he shouted, "Of course! Why didn't I see it before? What's needed here is a nice little war!"
 
And so, like any other schoolyard bully, he searched for the right victim until he discovered a little nation whose hatred of him was exceeded only by it's inability to do anything about it. And then he promptly blew them up.
 
Then the cowardly man received even greater praise for his penchant for gratuitous murder, and was thus content. But he continued ever after to listen carefully for sounds of screaming and crying and dying so he would know when to run away again.
 
               THE END.
 
 

Prime Feeny, we suppose.
 
Everyone assumes that freedom of speech is inherently heroic. What few realize is that it also takes courage to listen to it: there are many things in this life that we really don't want to hear, and freedom of speech pretty much guarantees that we're jolly well going to hear them anyway. Much thought has been given to this problem, but few countervailing measures have proved effective.
 
Lately, chiefly when dealing with Mrs. Feeny, we have experimented with sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting "NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!" at the tops of our voices, This is a promising approach, but it needs work.
 
Until next time, cheers, mon braves,
 
Hank
 
P.S. it may occur to some to wonder why your W Team does not simply throw Mrs. Feeny out with the morning newspaper. There is a complicated--and thoroughly depressing--answer to this question, which we will attempt to present next week in our 100th edition (!) of this publication.