In Which The Beetles Will Feed On Your Eyes

Don't Let Me Down

by DICK CHENEY

Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be made like this?

- Winston Churchill

There is nothing like the throes of war. When I first heard about the attacks on our country almost ten years ago, I made love to my wife, as I recalled last week. But that is not everything I did. I also told the secret service to get the president into a limousine and load it up with more alcohol than Katy Perry demands backstage at her concerts. (She hates carnations almost as much as I do.) When President Bush found me curled up in a fetal position inside the vehicle, smelling of Pop Tarts and gin, the first thing he said was, "You're pissing me off." Then he smiled and sucked grain alcohol from my belly-button.

HBO recently greenlit a BBC co-production of a World War I drama where the protagonist will be played by one Benedict Cumberbatch. (Scrootenjew Meeperschmidt wasn't available.) If this miniseries also ends up starring Rebecca Hall, I suggest we send the Storm Crows to ravage the BBC offices and demand satisfaction. The British always have funny ideas about war, they always think it's about falling in love like in The English Patient. They're like, "awesome war guys, let's go have consensual sex with the local populace." No. War is more about falling out of love with life and embracing death.

My first White House was Gerald Ford's and whenever we were addressing an overseas conflict he demanded we slip our dicks out into the open air. Don't get me started on my years with President Ford, controlling him was like trying to swordfight with yellow straw. The day we lost to Jimmy Carter I murdered a Canadian black bear. Sure, things went bad, but the below photograph depicts my first Oval Office orgasm.

I can only compare those initial moments of war, the look on the face of your adversary as he considers the prospect of his own demise, to waiting in a doctor's office with the best magazines in the world. Since the only good magazine left in the world is National Geographic and I never see that at my grandkids' pediatrician, it's better to imagine peeling open a shopping catalogue and discovering that anything can be purchased. During the initial phases of the first Gulf War, I demanded a lightsaber one morning and I had it by the afternoon. Carved in a grip of human bone were the words "Dick Maul."

We tore down statues in Iraq because it made a good image for television. I have no idea why Khal Drogo does it when he enslaves entire towns, killing and raping women and children. He already proved his point. There have been great men who enjoy war as much as Khal Drogo seems to, but there is no one who has ever enjoyed saying the word stallion as much as he does. From the looks of it, the populace Drogo enslaves is also quite religious, and their gods resemble the Old Gods of Westeros, perhaps some starfaring race that colonized the planet.

About his experience managing war, Churchill wrote "I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it." Every delusional warrior demands an adversary as mighty as he imagines himself. Ned Stark may not have the same affection for war as the Lannisters did during Robert's Rebellion, but you can't blame Cersei Lannister for not tying up her loose ends.

Even thousands of pages after the first visit from the King that opens A Game of Thrones, I am not entirely sure why Robert Baratheon goes to visit Winterfell. He had never done it before; he does not recognize the children of his best friend, and he can't look into the face of his friend's wife, who resembled the woman he lost.

The death of Jon Arryn must have guided his actions to some extent, but it is impossible to believe that King Robert lived his entire life siring bastards of brown hair and it never occurred to him to find it strange that none of his children by Cersei Lannister shared that characteristic. If Robert wanted a man loyal to him running the empire, he had better candidates in King's Landing. It seems more likely to me now, given my encyclopedic knowledge of warcraft, that he went to Winterfell to start the war he felt was coming.

The Lannisters hate the North. They hated it during that long overdue visit. They hated it so much they did not bother to be sure of Bran's death before they left. The very chill of winter must have upset them greatly.

Last night we got the first of many chapters in the relationship between Tyrion and his father, and it restored me from the anger I felt during last week's dwarfless episode. There is always a halfman in the middle of a war. He survives longer than his brethren because killing him would be an act of cruelty rather than an act of war. In order to accentuate his weakness, Tyrion uses the full thrust of his vocabulary and diminishes his true capabilities whenever possible, reminding me of how I ensured George W. Bush would be elected by a majority of Americans twice.

The problem with centering a television show around the excitement of war, is that real war is too confusing and complex to portray as anything except riotious, hilarious murder. For over three decades, that fraud Roger Ebert would begin every single review of a Vietnam movie by meaningfully citing Francois Truffaut's maxim that you can't make an anti-war movie because films about that subject make war seem like fantastic fun. He would just reuse this opening whenever a Vietnam movie came out, it started to get kind of weird after awhile, like he had just forgotten and we were supposed to pretend we didn't notice.

As in my own case, Truffaut's early years in the French armed forces consisted of him trying to escape his service. Unlike Jon Snow, the reason for escape from his enlistment was not because he wanted to go off and serve in a different war. He had experienced the first excitement of fighting, but once that passed, he realized that nothing else about the experience would be so great.

The first part of anything is the only part worth holding onto. The first time you ask Francis Fukuyama to lie for the sake of his country is the best time. The first minutes of eating a Frosty is a decadent pleasure, the rest recycles past guilt and shame with each wet bite. The first time keying David Frum's Oldsmobile and telling him you saw Puerto Ricans do it is the only time that matters. A chess move only counts with a victim.

I can't even feel bad for Sansa Stark. Arya, at least, is abandoned to the King's Highway. Ned Stark rots in a dungeon. Syrio Forel never dies. Renley Baratheon forces another guy to shave his chest with butter. Robert Baratheon hunts a boar, somewhere. Sansa is held up as an ideal in a time without any, and to watch her naivete fade stirs a warm excretion in my heart. She will never be higher than before she is forced to fall. 

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find last week's Game of Thrones recap here.

"Dead Or In Serious Trouble" - Kaiser Chiefs (mp3)

"Heard It Break" - Kaiser Chiefs (mp3)

"I Dare You" - Kaiser Chiefs (mp3)

In Which Game Of Thrones Reigns From A Horse

Rescind The Look Marring Your Daughter's Face

by DICK CHENEY

When I was young, not much older than most of the readers of this website were when they first exposed themselves to illicit drugs and questionable blogposts, I decided to write my own autobiography. Last week I revealed the back-of-the-book blurbs I could not include, and criticized The Atlantic repeatedly.

The response was simply overwhelming. I didn't realize how bored people were by The Atlantic, and I certainly didn't realize how defensive they were about the man currently slipping inside Leslie Knope after a long day at City Hall. I deeply regret the jokes I made about Adam Scott, 38, although to be completely frank, I was persuaded to avoid including my photoshops of Kermit the Frog superimposed over his face because it was felt it would make too many children confused about why a green amphibian was tongue-kissing Amy Poehler.

In order to square things with my fanbase (what are we politicians without our faaaaaaans?), I offer a special treat today. What follows is an exclusive excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, In Ma Time:

with my younger brother in 1952

When I was born, I was already five years old and I loved fishing. (I also loved crossbreeding animals. Did you know that when you mix a monkey and a cat, it's called a grinnet?) I would take my little brother, who I had nicknamed Scorpion, and make him kill animals in front of me. After he did, I would nod very seriously and ask him if he had thought of invading Iraq lately, familiarizing myself Ender's Game-style with a process I would repeat twice more in later daze.

I didn't really like school. I spent most of my time in class drawing cartoons of dragon orgasms and planting bags of oregano in girls' lockers to let them know I liked them. One particular young woman showed up at my locker with the bag of oregano I had placed there, and demanded to know if it was I who had done the deed. I told her it was one of my friends, and she went over to his locker, and cut her initials in his arm with a knife. I was so turned on that roughly eight years later I asked her to be my wife.

even back then, we were 86% percent sure that helmets were for pussies

My wedding to Lynne was a glorious affair, highlighted by when the priest asked me if I consented to whatever rigamarole he was putting forth, and I said, "Already did" and mimed penetration. This got a huge laugh among my frat brothers, and also from Lynne's slightly disturbed mother. But the truth was - I hadn't. Occasionally Lynne would permit me to softly violate her with my pinkie, but usually she was tired after the third orgasm and the ensuing sight of my penis only amused her.

In the past, I had met girls I liked, but when I asked them if the government had a right to tax the rich, they answered either that they supposed so, or that they didn't care. My response to either answer was to bellow "Krugman spawn!!" and ask them to undergo a Friedrich Hayek reeducation course in the Pyreenes if they wanted to continue to associate with me. Most, if not all, of these girls resembled a more hickish Faith Hill.

August 29th, 1964: my wedding day

That night the honeymoon began. Lynne placed her hand on my own and whispered in my ear, "I'm all yours, big boy. Just be sure not to use a condom, or criticize the estate tax, even in jest, or our daughter will come out gay." Unfortunately, I had anticipated trouble placing the rubber on my soda can penis and so had already applied several layers of protection. When I placed the sweating phallus inside my new wife, she said, "Jesus, Dick, that feels like a hot dog in saran wrap." After that one mishap, we had unprotected sex continuously for the next 64 years, even on 9/11:

a chair "conveniently" blocks my porcelain hammer in this photo from that fateful day

Game of Thrones' Ned Stark reminds me a lot of Al Gore, although he is missing many of Al's finest qualities: the willingness to back down from a fight, the hepatitis, the blonde tips in his hair, the lisp. Al does match up when it comes to rampant paranoia about the weather, though; "Winter is coming" is dangerously close to a bumper sticker on Al's family Volvo, or a tattoo Tipper features above her lady parts. In this last episode, Neddard was so dreadfully stupid that he didn't even talk to his daughters during the entire hour, even after the King died. At the very least you could say hi or give a heads up to Sansa that you're about to out her betrothed as a product of incest.

The incest "mystery" was the silliest part of Game of Thrones. It was like a writing prompt to get GRRM started on other, more important matters. Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss proved they understood the novels by revealing all as soon as possible. The television adaptation has judiciously ignored this "mystery", and in fact many of the secrets of Game of Thrones have already been come out earlier than they did in the novels, including a bizarre glossing over of Robert's death. What exactly was the point of not showing him gored by a boar, it cost too much money? I haven't seen a direwolf since episode six.

Actually, Jon Snow's direwolf, Ghost, did put in an appearance, with a human arm in his hand. Ooh, scary. Bring me some balls, you albino wolf, or bring me nothing. JK Ghost, you were a "good boy", but you also took up Robert Baratheon's waning screentime to hype a storyline that won't be paid off until 2019. We get the picture: there are some mean happenings north of the Wall, and the completely awesome Mance Rayder seems to be at the center of many of them. Each episode I keep hoping Samwell Tarly will be played by Matthew Broderick, but my dreams never come fully true unless I exert my Powers. In this photo, for example, you can see me giving Ronald Reagan Alzheimer's through the telepathic charge emitted from my huge brain:

on the reags

I'm not really sure how you do a Game of Thrones episode with no Tyrion, Bran, Robb, Sansa, Arya or Catelyn. Theon Greyjoy needed yet another nonsensical scene? This is beginning to approach the mystery of Jane Krakowski's continuing screentime in 30 Rock. Actually, that's not much of a mystery, Tina Fey just takes out her hatred of blondes on the character and her disgust with black people out on Tracy Morgan.

The five most useless characters on television are Theon Greyjoy, Dog the Bounty Hunter, the kid on Two and a Half Men once he passed puberty, David Spade, and Meredith Grey. An honorable mention of course goes to Don Draper's new wife Megan, whose teeth revolt every part of my being. If I have to hear Jon Hamm's voiceover in another car commercial, I will run him down like I did Paul Ryan's presidential bid.

If the audience clicks with a character, they will watch him or her do anything. There was one episode of I Love Lucy where Ricky grew a moustache and in order to compete with him Lucy pasted on a white beard. And it was five times better than The Hangover Part II, trust me. I had to watch the former in order to forget the latter. The one thing we don't want our characters to be is stupid, and there is nothing the least bit silly about pretending you have a solid white beard. There is, however, something completely retarded about trusting the guy who was in love with your ginger wife.

The only thing more unsurprising than The Hangover Part II was the fact that the sole surviving Targaryen has fallen in love with her rapist. (She tumbls about him a lot and calls him "the hubby" or "Oggo Drogo.") I would be mad if I did not know where this storyline was going. The Daenarys chapters of Game of Thrones were collected into a novella called Blood of the Dragon, and it won the 1997 Hugo for that form. "English" "actress" Emilia Clarke is getting a little hammy with her performance of the Khaleesi, and her longing looks towards her persecutor are becoming a little grating.

The last refuge of the epic fantasy is a sudden breath of realism. I suggest they strand Ms. Clarke somewhere in Pakistan and tell her to find her way back across the black seas. Some enterprising music executive did the same thing to Ke$ha and look how well that worked out for her.

Dick Cheney is perhaps the most senior of all This Recording contributors. He is a writer living on the banks of Hades. You can find his last Game of Thrones recapitulation here.

"Return to Innocence" - Enigma (mp3)

"Animal" - Ke$ha (mp3)

"A Song For You/I Can't Make You Love Me" - Bon Iver (mp3)

In Which We Want The Titular Throne In Game Of Thrones

Thrones Me 

by DICK CHENEY

Wow, before I get to the last two episodes of HBO's televised adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, let me first tell you about a buttnugget named Conor Friedersdorf. Actually, before I do that, let me show you a picture of George R.R. Martin, because it explains a lot about why the most attractive people in Game of Thrones always get murdered.

Christ, he looks like Little Sebastian. GRRM, as he was first called by Greg Bear when they were presumably having doggystyle intercourse in a gigantic bed shaped like Tuf Haviland's starship, is a nerd. But even worse is fucking Conor Booglesdorfermund. This moron is reportedly an associate editor at The Atlantic, which is about as prestigious as being a janitor at The New Yorker.

Friedersdorf is the kind of pseudo-intellectual weevil whose tweets are supposed to amount to some kind of insider-y journalist-speak. (Note: all editorial advice by "working" journalists amounts to, "How do we dumb down our work as much as possible to condescend to our readers, who we secretly believe are idiots?" If you find yourself writing a tweet that Jeff Jarvis could have as easily emitted from his anus, delete and find a new career.)

In analysing my new spectacular memoir, In My Time, Friedersdorf comes up with the following objections to my book. As anyone who lacks the kind of creativity I show on the toilet does, he framed his problems in a listicle:

1) He pushed hardest for an illegal warrantless wiretapping program that spied on the personal communications of countless innocent Americans, and kept the whole thing secret for years on end.

Um, I did what? That's ludicrous.

2) He was instrumental in instituting a program wherein the U.S. would capture a man, hold him in a secret prison, strip him nude, blindfold him, strap him to a board, and repeatedly force water into his throat and lungs in an effort to convince him that he was going to die of drowning.

HOW DO YOU THINK OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS CAUGHT, FREIDERSFUCK? Then again, thanks to the uber-talented Peter Atencio, I now have my doubts about that:

3) He asserted that the president has the unchecked authority to take any U.S. citizen, declare him an enemy combatant, lock him up indefinitely, deny him counsel, and prevent him from challenging his status in the court system.

Uh, doesn't he? Why do you think you haven't seen Bobby Brown in public in several years?

4) His often misleading and at times flat out inaccurate statements about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's supposed ties to al Qaeda were instrumental in leading us into an ill-conceived war.

Didn't this guy's president just make a huge speech about what a success we've had in Iraq? The only thing worse than The Atlantic is The Atlantic when Andrew Sullivan was still employed there.

That's enough focus on my critics. If you focus on your critics too much, you burn out too fast, like Julia Allison or Haley Reinhardt. I think of myself more as the bald Whitney Cummings, and so do the fabulous individuals who agreed to blurb my forthcoming book, In My Time. The working title was of course In Ma Time.

talking over the casting of Varys with a young Donald Rumsfeld

Here are some of the blurbs that due to space concerns we were forced to leave on the cutting room floor:

Dick Cheney's radiant sexuality shines through every page of his new memoir. I especially enjoyed the anecdote about the time he masturbated while imagining Fran Drescher hosting the Academy Awards. Improbable, ill-mannered, and obsessed with Lost, I couldn't put Dick Cheney's new book down.

- the gay guy making out with Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation

Go inside the finest eight years in our country's history with the man who secretly ran it all. If you're looking for 400+ pages of excessively mean shots at Whitney Houston, The Atlantic, and the comedy of Ben Stiller, you've come to the right places. Ty.

- George W. Bush

J.J. Abrams is a stupid geek and Super 8 looks fucking terrible.

- Everyone

Dick was a great man and a better friend. He is also the founder of the website Aloha Giggles. He explained Lost to me when even Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof still insisted it was about a yellow light in a cave. He is also the only person who found the Hawaii Five-0 season finale the least bit believable and for that I thank him.

- Daniel Dae Kim (Jin from Lost)

Fortunately we have the last two weeks of Game of Thrones to soothe the pain of bad book blurbs. Why are you not watching Game of Thrones? Last night's episode depicted two of the most famous moments of the first Song of Ice and Fire novel, and unlike the general casting and character of Neddard Stark, there were no fuckups. This was probably because creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss wrote the episode themselves. The crowning of Viserys Targaryen and the exodus of Tyrion Lannister from the Eyrie were both tremendous, perhaps even better than their relevant scenes in the books.

When it comes to historic settings in modern fantasy, the Eyrie has to be on the short list with Tolkien's Mines of Moria, Vance's watery background for hussade on the planet Truillion, and C.S. Lewis' wardrobe. One of the great things about the genre of fantasy is that is can make all our greatest fears literal. Viserys Targaryen desires a kingdom for the price of his sister, and obtains the crown.

Tyrion cowers in the presence of greater heights and is perched before the titanic drop of the Moon Door. Tyrion's relationship with his rescuer, Bronn of the Blackwater, is one of the great treasures of this world. If you can't understand why that appeals to me, take note of the ample Tyrion Lannister-Karl Rove concordance in this adaptation.

Back in King's Landing, things were a lot more boring. One scene actually was comprised simply of Ned Stark reading a book. Game of Thrones didn't take the proper time to unveil the dragon skulls in the Dragon Keep the way they were meant to be seen: bone-by-bone against the skin of young Arya Stark, until the terrifying whole was revealed. When you read the books, you didn't want the Targaryens to return to Westeros and wreak death upon all your favorite characters, but in this version Daenarys is a great heroine and the King a great monster who beats his wife and can't even treat a Stark with the proper respect.

The previous episode consisted of over 20 percent doggystyle intercourse, but the show seems to be toning back the constant sex of late. (Did we really need to see Theon Greyjoy get laid, or for that matter, any Greyjoy do anything?) I got an e-mail from a misguided friend of mine ranking the books by quality. He argued for 2,4,3,1, which is pretty much the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

A Clash of Kings is known as the worst of the books, concerned as it is with House Baratheon and House Greyjoy, and A Feast for Crows, prematurely divorced as it was from the forthcoming A Dance With Dragons, is about as action-packed as any televised scene in Winterfell. Every true fan regards A Storm of Swords as GRRM's epic achievement, so great a work that the author himself was weeping like a grey baby as he composed the final chapters.

Then again, all of A Song of Ice and Fire is awesome. A woman ate a horse's heart and was applauded for it. You can't even see that kind of stuff on Ricki Lake anymore. A man the size of a mountain cut off a horse's head with his sword and they showed it. A whore on a turnip cart demonstrates her vagina to Theon for under a nickel. A eunuch plots rebellion and the mayor from The Wire plots worse. A prince gave a gorgeous necklace to his bethrothed and promised to never mistreat her. Khal Drogo dropped a pound of his golden semen on the villain's head to kill him, and the guy's sister was just like, "He was never one of us." Fuck America, I have found the greatest land there is.

In so many ways the world of the Seven Kingdoms (the North, the Vale, the Stormlands, the Iron Islands, the Reach and the Westerlands, for those who keep asking) is preferable to our own. The only thing America has that Westeros doesn't is fantasy football, and come September, we won't even have that anymore.

You guys, the last thing I want to do is spoil the last chapter of In Ma Time, but let's just say I have titled it, "America?" The question mark after the name of our country expresses the considerable skepticism I have about this country's future. As I was waiting for Game of Thrones to come on and breaking a chicken I had named J.J.'s neck with my hands, I saw the preview for HBO's original movie Too Big to Fail, about the bailout of Wall Street.

In Westeros there are also bailouts of massive companies/kingdoms, but they come from other companies/kingdoms, as God intended. If you screw up in this hard world, you don't get another chance, you simply die. The stakes are that high. And when the alternative to failure is death, companies simply don't collapse as often. We must try to learn all we can from these people, so start watching GOT immediately when you get home from your job as associate editor of something.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his most recent Game of Thrones recap here. You can find the rest of his work on This Recording here.

"Memories of the Future" - Handsome Furs (mp3)

"What We Had" - Handsome Furs (mp3)

"When I Get Back" - Handsome Furs (mp3)

Sound Kapital, the new album from the Handsome Furs, the duo composed of Wolf Parade's Dan Boeckner and his wife Alexei Perry, will be released in late June from Sub Pop. You can preorder it here.