Where In The World Is Dick Cheney?

The Boy and I were talking the other day and he posed the question, Has anyone seen Dick Cheney these days? I have to admit, I haven’t seen him on TV or in any news reports for several months.

This leads one to put the thinking cap on and figure out what he’s up to. Now The Boy believes he’s been clinically dead for years but has been kept alive by an intricate set of machinery powered by pure evil. Perhaps there is a glitch in the machinery and he’s been in for repairs or, in The Boy’s mind, perhaps he is working his way through the world and eating innocents as they scramble from his path.

I have a better theory and I think it casts a better light on our VP. I think he’s been saddling up on unmanned drones and raining fiery death on terrorists in the Middle East. Can’t you just see him riding a drone, twirling his cowboy hat and yelling “yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa hooooooooooooooo!” as he takes out another bad guy? If so, I say let him have his fun. His term is almost up.

The Bad News Keeps On Coming

Lord knows we’ve all been hearing terrible news lately. From predictions of financial chaos and recession to foreign policy challenges around the world, the news has roughed up the national psyche. To add to the depressing news, I have had my own battle with the disillusionment of the legal process and fairness and accuracy among journalists.

The capper of the week came yesterday when Ali slowly and carefully came into my office to deliver the worst news of all: Diane Lane was giving up her movie career! Of course later on I found out she was only “considering” it, but even that hint of good news wasn’t enough to buck me up. Her reasons for wanting out are even suspect. She claims she wants to spend more time with her children, including her demon-spawn step kids from that Josh guy. She also said she was tired of the same old roles and coming off as an American sweetheart. Of course I support more roles for her that includes torrid scenes, but I still don’t think she should stop entertaining me, er, I mean us, just for that.

The thing that worries me most is that I have been writing a novel since 1962 and I have her in mind for the lead role after it becomes a best-seller and the movie rights are bought up. So, Diane, please wait for me. I’ll even write a dirty scene in the book if that helps you change your mind. If you want, your agent could contact my agent and we could take a meeting to discuss. Of course I don’t have an agent so you can just reach me through my blog and tell me where and when to meet. Please pretend to be someone else so you don’t tip off Mrs. Laz.

With so much bad news out there, I don’t know what to expect next. It would just be my luck to hear that Clay Aiken, the heartthrob of millions of older women, had come out of the closet. No, that would be too much to bear.

Defamation And No Dignity For The Departed

Every now and again you wonder why so many people have been raised to pull the wings off flies. We would all agree that Sadists exist and, just to be clear, a good majority of them have chosen politics as their profession.

Over the past few days my company and I have been accused of organizing illegal activities and to make matters worse my brother, Bill Arno, has been specifically named as the ring leader. Most of you know this is impossible as he passed away three years ago and you’d think this fact would end the story and embarrass those who have decided for their own reasons to drag his name and my company’s name through the mud heap of politics. It didn’t.

As near as I can follow the story, a few weeks ago the San Bernardino County Democratic Party began to investigate complaints that people had been asked to register to vote and their party affiliation was changed to republican without their knowledge or consent. The sleuths at party headquarters were able to determine that the registration program was being run by a company that had in the past sub-contracted work for a sub-contractor that I routinely hire. I’ve never had warm-fuzzies about the guy but I don’t have warm-fuzzies about a lot the people and groups that work in my field.

The SB party must have believed it had a good scandal on its hands and, since politics and those who report on it live by scandal, there must have been a lot of salivating. For reasons I don’t quite yet understand, although I will relate my theory below, the finance chairman of the party, who I shall hereafter refer to simply as “Jackass,” figured there must be a puppet master to pull the strings of the accused. From what he told me, he engaged in three weeks of internet searches and decided that my company’s name had appeared in numerous – and dubious – news stories and, as he admitted, he decided to link us based on that assumption. For good measure, he decided to include Bill’s name specifically as the coordinator of the plot.

A press release was issued by the SB Party that included details of the alleged malfeasance and referenced Bill’s name along with the name of my company. A similar release was put out by the California Democratic Party, although they left our names out. The press release got the attention of the local press and I woke up one morning to an e-mail from Sladed with an attached story by the Riverside Press Enterprise that included the details as laid out by the SB Democratic Party.

I phoned one of the reporters who wrote the story at a cost of $2.99 per minute from being 5,000 miles and nine time zones ahead of Riverside (most would say that is not far enough away from Riverside). I asked her why in the name of Christ my name appeared in her story when she had not talked to me. She explained she tried but didn’t get a hold of me and then decided to run with the story without a confirmation or admission from me. Back in the day when I was a journalist, there were certain standards in place in which no editor would have allowed a reporter to write a story without making a stronger effort to reach the parties involved in the claim, especially when those making the claim are a political party sending out a press release to gain political advantage.

The story in the Riverside paper did not include Bill’s name so at that point I didn’t know too much about the details of the press release. I told the reporter that I was not involved with the project and that her story was erroneous and I berated her for not taking better care of the facts. She quoted me liberally and said she would make the corrections in a follow-up story she was working on. She acted sympathetic, and that is good, although I thought she should have acted embarrassed for being duped by a minor person working for a minor chapter of a political party.

A few hours later I was informed by Ali from the office that another reporter had called and wanted a comment from me on the story and also indicated that the county district attorney was considering charges against my firm. Despite the fact it was after midnight where I was, I called her. She had written a short entry with few details on her blog the night before but I hadn’t yet seen them.

When I called her she began to ask me questions about my involvement. I told her to slow down and to tell me where she was getting her information. This was when I learned about the press release. I asked her to read the part that referred to me and this is when she told me that Bill was named in the release. I was absolutely floored when I heard that and was speechless for a moment, still trying to figure out if I heard her correctly. Obviously I told her it was impossible because Bill had passed away and, without skipping a beat, she asked me if she could quote me on that bit of news. Stunned again, I became quite angry and, I suppose, cynical to her. I chided her for taking the bait without being more inquisitive of the source of the story.

After this bombshell I told her I wouldn’t speak with her anymore unless she gave me the name and contact information of the person who was responsible for putting out the press release. She complied and it turns out the author of the release (Jackass) worked for Bill and I a decade ago and was such a pain in the butt that we decided not to work with him anymore.

Rather than call him, because I had now figured out the revenge factor as a motivation behind the release, I tried to get the chairman of the local party on the phone. An intern there tracked her down and told me she would call me later in the day or the next day. Instead, Jackass called me. I started in on him and asked him if he was aware that Bill had died three years ago. Instead of this calling into question the veracity of his own story he asked me if I had any proof that Bill had died. I am not sure precisely the number of curse words I used, but one could use their imagination. While he was explaining how he arrived at using my company’s name in his press release – the links in his internet searches – he was searching for information on Bill’s death. Since he didn’t find any he accused me of lying and still wanted proof. I used more colorful words for him.

As with the reporter, I asked him why he didn’t call me to confirm what he had written. He told me there was no point as I would just lie to him, as I was lying about Bill. He even began to say negative things about Bill. I knew something about the company that had been hired to do the work and I gave him their name hoping this would end the nightmare, and then I told him I wanted a retraction of his press release and an apology. He refused to do so until he investigated my story, something I pointed out should have been completed before he chose to defame Bill and my company. I then hung up on the bastard (aka Jackass) and wrote a letter to the chairman that explained the press release was maliciously inaccurate and that I wanted it fixed or I would have somebody’s ass.

The next morning I woke up to this delightful headline “Man accused of voter fraud dead, brother says.” I immediately thought of Sue and Cass and Janee reading this and how they would feel to have to deal with this painful experience again. It also wasn’t a happy moment for me.

I waited the entire day for the chairman of the local party to write me back and let me know what she intended to do. When she didn’t, I contacted our lawyer who is very friendly with the chief counsel for the state democratic party, as am I. The dems’ lawyer agreed that the local party had made a mistake in naming me and he would have the state leaders contact them and suggest they offer a retraction. Instead, I got a ranting call from Jackass again in no mood to apologize. He complained to me that the person I had given him who I believed to be under contract for the voter registration drive hadn’t called him back. I told him it shouldn’t matter anymore as the Press Enterprise ran a story in the morning quoting a spokesman for the California Republican Party on the fact they had hired the contractor in question themselves. This wasn’t good enough for Jackass who said he would continue to investigate on his own. Apparently the Press Enterprise was good enough when it ran a story critical of Bill and me, but not when it clears our names.

I told Jackass about my lawyer’s conversation with the state party’s lawyer, but he didn’t seem to care. So I matter-of-factly told him that he had been given enough time to correct his press release and I would be suing him and the local party. However, perhaps out of morbid curiosity, I decided to call the local party chairwomen. I was interested in what she would say and, frankly, I half expected her to apologize herself and fire the Jackass. Instead she asked me about Bill again and said, “I find it unusual that we can’t find a story or an obituary about his death.” I asked her if she was a lunatic and questioned why this was so difficult to believe, why it was germane to the party’s story and pointed out that by then two newspapers had quoted me that Bill had died. I also read her the quote by the republican spokesman since I assumed she had not read the paper that morning. She said she had but didn’t believe what was in the newspaper. Strangely, both she and Jackass believe everything they read on the internet.

So I told her I would be suing them and she pleaded for more time to look into the matter. I told her the time to get it right had come and gone and the damage had been done by the printing of the first story. The main problem for me is that my political opponents love to plant negative stories about me and then string them all together to demonstrate this broad pattern of “illegal” behavior coordinated by me. My opponents will gladly use the first story, but not the second.

At the end of the conversation, I was shaking I was so angry. It felt like I had fallen down the Rabbit-Hole in Alice In Wonderland. Since Jackass had claimed to have done all his research on the internet, I thought I would do my own searches, particularly about Bill. Within two minutes, I had pulled up four mentions of Bill’s death doing a simple Yahoo! search. The first one that came up was an amazing, but heart-wrenching blog post by Bill’s friend Renfield who lives in Japan. He was with Bill when he first collapsed, gave him CPR and was with Sue and others when Bill took his last breath. His post gives great detail on how Bill passed and his last 48 hours while he was in the hospital. While it’s also a beautiful tribute, I guess I put Ren’s account out of my memory so reading it again just sent me over the edge. I balled like a baby and felt every moment of the pain Ren felt and later how Sue felt. I think Ren’s post is worth reading, but I can understand why people wouldn’t want to so I will end this article with the way Ren ended his post three years ago: “His room was overlooking the ocean and when he died the sky was blue and the haze was far, making the mountains float. The sound of the ocean waved through the room as slowly as his breath. His heart beat and his lungs filled with salt air for the last time. And the ocean waves rumbled on.”

Thank you to Ren for being such a good friend to Bill and Sue and also to Big Tony and “The Verduginator” for being there for Sue and holding her through the toughest moments of her life. No two-bit political hack is ever going to take away what Bill meant to all of us nor change the fact that he lived his life with integrity and honor. I chose to use Bill’s full name in this post because I want an account of this story to show up on the search engines and hopefully people will come to learn the truth.

The Big 3-0

What can I say, she loves me. As far-fetched as it appears, Mrs. Laz has officially stuck with me -- off and on -- for 30 years now. That’s a lot of thin and not too much thick and a lot of oysters without too many pearls. No sense questioning her sanity because a reasonable evaluation of the facts does not support her 30-year commitment to me. In fact, if we’re talking about committing, it should be in the context of rubber walls and straight jackets for at least one of us.

Back in 1978, under the evening sky and low-flying aircraft we got hitched. Neither of us was old enough to shave back then, but we thought we were and we thought we had the maturity to endure. And despite the fact that we probably we’re too young and had too much confidence in our version of maturity we strung 30 years of marriage together. Just chalk it up to the fact that we grew into adulthood together and, for some reason, it just worked.

I was a little caught off guard by this anniversary because it’s not a “Silver” or a “Gold” or even a “Platinum” wedding anniversary. I am not even sure what gift category this falls under, although I guessed, incorrectly I am told, that it is aluminum foil. And with my well-stated aversion to “magic numbers,” I just figured it was no different than 29 years. Turns out, I was wrong.

To get out of my lack of proper preparation for this marriage milestone, I tried to dazzle her with my typical facts and figures. I told her that we have slept through one-third of our marriage, so that brings us down to 20 years. Then we have to take away the years she didn’t like me very much plus subtract the number of days I have been on the road. I think the math brings us down to about 14 years. Please don’t tell me that a 14-year anniversary deserves special notice.

This year’s anniversary has turned out to have a similar pattern as many other anniversaries and birthdays. She is at home and I am elsewhere, so we are celebrating our anniversary in multiple time zones and on different continents. Which reminds me (at the wrong time, as usual) of an old Woody Allen joke when he explains he is divorcing his wife. It was suggested that he and his wife take a vacation or get divorced. After some thought, he decides on the divorce by figuring a vacation is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have. Maybe Mrs. Laz will skip over that last segment.

Lord knows I don’t know what she sees in me but she means the world to me. Happy anniversary from the land of dust and hairy women.

Good Bye To The Girl

So the Girl is off on the biggest adventure of her life. About two weeks ago she got an offer to work part time with Make-A-Wish Foundation in San Francisco, a city she has wanted to call home for a very long time. Almost too quickly she and Mrs. Laz found her an apartment – the very first they looked at – returned back to San Diego, packed up her worldlies in a small rental truck and a day later the two drove back up to San Francisco to turn the Girl’s dream into a home.

Of course I am devastated that she is living 500 miles north and I will forever miss her being around the house. But the sad feelings are somewhat tempered by knowing she is so happy where she is. You can hear the contentment in her voice when we talk on the phone and with all her friends living just blocks from her I know she is not lonely (except I know she misses Nubs the cat and Spooner the dog – wish she missed us more, but what can you do?).

This move makes Mrs. Laz and me total Empty-Nesters since it is doubtful we’ll have a return of children anytime soon. Although kids tend to resemble boomerangs, it’s doubtful we’ll have ours back in the house as anything other than visitors. This is, naturally, natural and something all of our parents had to go through at some point. I wonder if my parents felt this divided sense of sorrow that I moved out but pride that I was striking out on my own. In the case of my parents, they hid their sadness by renting out my room within hours of my departure. “Be strong,” I remember telling them. “Who are you?” I remember them answering. It was good of them not to dwell, I think.

Now Mrs. Laz and I have the freedom to do as we wish; run around the house naked, having sex in every room, ect. I wonder if this admission will lesson the number of guests? Ah, so what, due to the ravages of age and my diminished good looks and charm the chance of the multi-room romp will be a rare event indeed.

Em, if you’re reading this, know that I will miss much about you. How we had our own language built on the poetic genius of modern classic films such as Anchorman, Old School, Zoolander and, of course, Step Brothers (I did like it). It will not be the same watching television without you, which means less anxiety about being in the room “first,” but also not having you around to share our thoughts on who will win American Idol and the Biggest Loser. It also means I will miss your never-ending patience for me as I asked, “Who’s that?” and “What’s going on?” in the middle of some inane MTV show that I would never figure out what was going on with a 10-page dissertation.

I am very happy and proud for you, Em, and hope so much that you find out what you want from this life and learn to adapt to your new environment, helping you grow from these experiences. I love you and will miss you, but am so happy you are on your way.

Sinking Low

For a while I have been laboring on a post to explain the Georgia/Russia situation. At least as I see it, anyway. However, I am taking a brief break to speak out about something that has lowered the national discourse to a sad place. I wish I could say we have hit an all time low, but that is a bar set very, very low indeed.

There is little known about John McCain’s VP pick Sarah Palin. I heard her name mentioned a few months back as a potential selection but I soon forgot about it. My only opinion back then was that a woman could attract some democrats to McCain; particularly after so many were drawn to Hillary Clinton based on the fact that, as Palin said, she had poked 18 million holes in the Glass Ceiling.

Palin was introduced to the public (outside of Alaska and a few politically-obsessed shut-ins) last Friday. Her honeymoon with the left-wing blogosphere and the major media lasted approximately 30 seconds. A story was immediately put out that Palin’s fifth child, the one born with Down Syndrome, was not really her baby, but the baby of her own daughter. There was no explanation in the various blogs and follow-up news reports as to why someone would make up such a story. What would Palin have to gain from lying about something that has no consequence to anyone but her own family? It makes no sense to anyone with sense.

In order to calm the media that was predictably feeding at the left-wing blogs, the McCain campaign put out the statement that Palin’s daughter couldn’t have been the mother of the four-month own child as she was five months pregnant herself. And, the capper, her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock and only 17 years old. Wow, what a revelation! But what does it have to do with the overall Electoral process? Nothing revealing, at least nothing more revealing or interesting than the very likeable Juno, a movie this year about a 17-year-old getting pregnant and putting the baby up for adoption.

As long as a 17-year-old has been brought into the political discussion, let’s examine behavior from other 17-year-olds. Let’s particularly discuss what the people we are actually voting for were up to at that age – and not their young daughter. John McCain at 17 had just taken an oath to defend his country by enlisting in the U.S. Navy and embarking on a storied and difficult military career. What was Sen. Obama, an actual presidential candidate, doing at age 17? By his own admission in one of his two autobiographies, he was using marijuana and cocaine and explaining that his drug use was a way to get through tough times while he was young.

On the one hand, the media and some on the Left want to examine the choices made by the 17-year-old daughter of the vice presidential candidate, but seem less interested in illegal choices made by the democrat’s presidential candidate at the same age. And, of course, no mention on the choice McCain made at the same age. If it’s fair game to go after choices made by young people, then let’s have a broader discussion that contrasts the choices made before the actual candidates were adults.

To his credit, Obama has said the candidate’s children should be off limits to such scrutiny and certainly the media held to this standard while Chelsea Clinton was in the White House and her entire family life turned into a soap opera. Having said that, Obama should speak louder and more directly about the press coverage of Palin’s daughter and throw a little cold water on his supporters in the blogs. If he doesn’t, one has to assume he is letting them do his dirty work and damaging the life of a teenage girl to score cheap political points.