In Which We Grab The Hand Of The King

Aegon's Handjob

by DICK CHENEY

Game of Thrones
creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
HBO, Sundays at 9pm

What a week. I feel like Phil Jackson looks. Since I'm now essentially retired from political life, my work schedule usually looks something like this:

Monday: Yoga. Complain about how boring The Killing is, masturbate, appear on Fox News. Sandwiches.

Tuesday: Pickup basketball at the rec center (our team is Jaime Lannister's Left Hand). Masturbate, criticize the president, masturbate.

Wednesday: Survivor. Screen a film for my grandkids, usually The Ghost and the Darkness. Masturbate. South Park, late snack with James Baker. Put on my Scar mask and scare the bejesus out of the kids by pouncing out of their closet and growling, "IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU, MUFASA WOULD STILL BE ALIVE!" Gluten-free baked potato.

Thursday: PBS sting. Parks and Recreation. Popping Andrew Breitbart's tires to keep him paranoid. National Review. The Weekly Standard. Cat Fancy.

Friday: Off day.

This week, however, I had to get our ducks in order for the GOP nomination. You didn't think Karl Rove and I were going to let a rube like Donald Trump become president? Communism was only a red herring. Complicating matters was the fact that my number one sleeper candidate sadly comes from a broken home. We were about to cross him off our list until I remembered what Jon Snow was capable of, and I screamed at Karl, "You know nothing Jon Snow!"

Many of history's great men were bastards: Confucious, C-3P0, Alexander Hamilton, Scar, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jesus. Giving all out-of-wedlock children a particular surname is a nice touch, stolen presumably from the Plantagenets who formed the inspiration for most of George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire.

Don't ask me who Aegon the Conqueror is modeled after, it hurts my feelings. Isn't it obvious? We have the same jawline.

I originally tried to conquer the Wyoming state house with a dragon named Balerion the Dread but he died of frostbite when I tied him to a fir tree outside McDonald's and I had to obtain political power by other means. Scar was my thinspiration after Balerion perished, and then I was sustained by the strength of my wife, Lynne the Terrible.

These are tough times. I tried to watch Treme last week and it turned into The Wire overnight. This would be an ideal development if it were 1996, but it is sadly no longer 1996. Also, everything on Treme feels like a thinly veiled insult directed at me, as does the entire existence of John Goodman and Samwell Tarly. The casting gods did not smile on Jon Snow's fat friend: Jonah Hill should have jumped all over that part, instead he now looks like a deflated balloon.

Game of Thrones really started to click last night. I can account for three potential causes for the improvement in the drama:

(1) During all of Daenarys' scenes, an inset of Khal Drogo's phallus (twice the winner of Penis of the Year at the Dothraki Emmys) was displayed half erect, and there was considerable tension as to how big exactly it could get. (Answer: .8 Michael J. Fox.)

(2) Robert Baratheon's bastard Genry turned out to be Chris from Skins, and

(3) Tyrion Lannister was finally put in an interesting situation. The dwarf who bangs whores was a cliche in Napoleon's time. Tyrion is more fascinating when he's talking his way out of a situation than when he's talking his way into one.

Lynne saw me watching Game of Thrones and sat down for a second. The following conversation ensued:

LYNNE: When does this take place?

ME: Smh

LYNNE: No, really?

ME: About three hundred years after Aegon's Landing.

LYNNE: In England?

ME: Christ. OK, do you know the doom of Valryia?

LYNNE: Was that Lady Gaga's name before she changed it?

ME: Did you order the Code Red?

LYNNE (softly): You're goddamn right I did.

The Doom of Valryia was, of course, the initial environmental catastrophe that forced the Targaryens from their ancestral home, where sex with hot wax was de rigeur. How history really unfolds is a major theme of Game of Thrones. Recounted in history books, it seems a pale imitation of how events really unfold without hindsight. Nazis were celebrated as well as feared throughout the world, but to think of it now the Third Reich seems like a nasty little zit on the face of the civilization.

It was far more than that and appealed to many more people. As did the Mad King Aerys, who had his supporters. The Targaryens always had loyalists, and in fact a few of them were decent men despite their incestuous bloodlines (dragons usually marry a sister or brother).

Aegon the Dragon - or Aegon the Conqueror as he was called in last night's episode - came to Westeros from Valyria, and his armies were made powerful by his three dragons. His brother Oryx was a bastard and helped him to his throne from his homebase of Dragonstone. Much of this backstory was revealed while the last dragon, Viserys Targaryen, was carnally entering a prostitute, I suppose as a way of getting the audience to sexually indulge historical details of a world that never existed.

The empowerment of Danys and Arya is what made Game of Thrones the remedy to the male-dominated Tolkien snoozefests. (Have you ever actually tried to read The Lord of the Rings? I'd rather read a book by Jerome Corsi.) Arya is such an awesome character that GRRM's wife told him she would file for divorce if he killed her off. Men are impotent weasels in GOT, women are the real protagonists of the drama.

The one thing GRRM screwed up until the sequels was the character of Catelyn Stark. We don't want to see her so easily taken in by Littlefinger, we can't sympathize with someone who would accuse a dwarf of murder without any proof, especially after he took the time to create a horse-riding apparatus for her disabled son. Game of Thrones is awesome because no one in it is stupid, and everything that happens in an unbelievable world is true to us.

On the page, we can never sympathize with Cersei Lannister, but on the screen, she is the jilted wife of an obese serial adulterer with an outstandingly attractive brother. Who could resist? Who doesn't want more for their children than they had themselves? No wonder she doesn't want her successor to be a ginger queen.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find the previous two Game of Thrones recaps here and here.

"Tiny Skeletons" - An Horse (mp3)

"Airport Death" - An Horse (mp3)

"Swallow the Sea" - An Horse (mp3)

In Which We Taste The Balls Of The Bear

A Whole New World

by DICK CHENEY

Game of Thrones
creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss

Peter Beinart ended the war on terror yesterday, which was nice of him to do. Does he have a solution for the White Walkers of the North? He should just ask Marty Peretz whether the war on terror is over; the response he receives will be something along the lines of "PALESTINIANS?!?!"

If I have to hear one more person talk about the death of the big guy, I am going to walk around pouting everywhere like Ned Stark. You didn't know him the way I did.

Pocahontas saved John Smith by throwing herself on the very rocks that would have been used to dice his face. She got her way and was renamed Rebecca for her trouble. Catelyn Stark is into bold moves like that. She possesses so much faith in her husband that she secretly follows him to King's Landing, and let's face it, doesn't appear to be very interested in meeting up with him or even visiting her kids. This makes her later behavior at Robb Stark's wedding all the more unsettling.

Should we really let a weaselly-looking particle accelerator like Peter Beinart end the war on terror? Ask Khal Drogo if the war on terror is over; he will likely answer by grunting and having newly consensual sex with his wife Daenarys. Poor Cersei Lannister. There's a mounting army to destroy her husband rounding up adherents across the Narrow Sea, the Starks think she tried to kill paralyzed Bran, and a bunch of wild direwolves are constantly biting her children. Cersei Lannister isn't paranoid - she has more enemies  than Julian Assange, which is no coincidence seeing as they use the same wigmaker.

ask the forest people for a new weave

I view Daenarys Targaryen as something of a feminist pioneer along the lines of Audre Lorde, Susan B. Anthony, or Kat Dennings. It makes sense that she doesn't want to eat horse anymore, given that her husband goes by the Great Stallion, which I suppose opens up a paternity question of some sort. With their steely albino countenances, the Targaryens look more likely to be schtupping each other's siblings than the Lannisters, but perhaps all such tendencies were scrambled during the tyrannical reign of the Mad King Aerys.

Game of Thrones is a veritable fountain of wisened, crackly wisdom. Someone is constantly advising someone else of something, although the resulting lesson isn't as good as those of my TR colleague. Here is basically what I have learned so far: 

- Always check your bowl first before packing a new one in case there's something left

- Jon Snow is an extremely forgiving swordsman

- It is a capital crime that Matthew Broderick was not cast as Littlefinger as God demanded of Moses, although I guess theoretically he could still play Samwell Tarly

- Howie Rose really needs to grow up

- Do not greet your plumber with the phrase "hello giggles" and even "aloha giggles" is pushing it

- Despite living in a wintry castle with them for the past decade, Ned Stark is only surface-level familiar with his daughters' names or likes/dislikes 

"can someone get my daughter a fucking barbie doll? varys?!?"

- Congratulations to BO, but who needs friends when you have the NYT?

- Dornish women are known for the spiky teeth that emerge from their nether regions

- Varys uses children as spies

Were you in the mood for seventy older men suggestively telling Tyrion Lannister about the threat from the north? That's basically what the little guy's trip to the Wall amounted to. Trust me, you don't want to walk into the Pentagon and start quizzing generals about the odds against the enemy. They always want more money to fight him, just as Yoren wants more men to fight whatever's worse than the wildlings.

The only group of people more clueless than a karass of generals are Khal Drogo's people. Game of Thrones posits that people are just not as smart in a desert climate, which makes sense if you've ever been to San Diego. I'm too tired to find all the articles about Game of Thrones being racist. The world is racist, have you examined the voting on American Idol lately or watched TBS in the last three years? Why should Westeros be any different?

Having a communal television experience is all very well and good, but it's hard to imagine Game of Thrones appealing to an older demographic. They were on that wall! I still feel young at heart, though just like Robert Baratheon, I get a little flimsy after my second keg of wine.

Ned Stark's idea of bonding with his daughter is admiring her sword, which is a metaphor too disturbing to contemplate in a recession. He gets her a Braavo swordfighting instructor who is perhaps also there to watch his daughter's back and may be more than a simple teacher. We have no idea how Ned either purchased a doll for Sansa or found an instructor for Arya, which makes sense because he spent most of the episode tearing down Jaime Lannister for saving King's Landing from a fiery death, and a shopping montage didn't fit with that.

He thinks heart-to-heart talks with his daughter are tough? Let me provide the rough transcript of when my wonderful daughter Mary chose a particularly busy moment during GWB's first presidential campaign to inform me she was gay:

MARY: Ellen DeGeneres -

ME: I know, why isn't With Friends Like These on DVD? I was almost a hundred percent that Jeremy Piven was gay after watching that show. He was always skipping everywhere.

MARY: Speaking of gay -

ME: Don't start criticizing Lost again! I can't fucking take it!

MARY: If it turns out that Jacob's power comes from a yellow light in a cave, will you admit I'm right?

ME: DAMN YOU!

I never had a chance to have one of those "When you sit on the Iron Throne..." talks with my keeds. Although the other day I did stop by The Potomac School to see my grandkids and take a shit on Al Gore's old front lawn. He knows what I did. Whenever children ask me what to do, I simply tell them to fuck off.

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

"Long Nights" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

"End of the Road" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

"Rise" - Eddie Vedder (mp3)

In Which Our Chastity Is Compromised By Khal Drogo

Missing U Rhaegar Targaryen

by DICK CHENEY

Game of Thrones
creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
HBO, Sundays at 9pm

Guess who's back. Back again. Cheney's back. Inform no one of my presence here. Ever since Lost went off the air I have been preparing hundreds of jokes about Khal Drogo, and Anna Holmes goes and ruins them after only one week. There were 19 instances of doggy-style intercourse in the first two episodes of David Benioff's adapation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, and there are guaranteed to be hundreds more. Since they appear to have borrowed the sets from Black Knight for the series, it's best to focus the attention on the foreground.

As Daenerys was being raped for the second straight episode, this time in front of some dragon eggs she plans to incubate, I really felt for Ms. Holmes, since this meant she was going to have to read at least 800 comments about how much Ms. Targaryen was "asking for it" on various Game of Thrones fansites. My favorite suggested name for a Game of Thrones fansite is "Winter Is Humming" and my least favorite is "The Eerie Eyrie." Extra credit for those who can work in the name of Jon Snow's magnificent direwolf Ghost.

the eyrie - Tyrion seemed a lot smaller IRLAfter Laura Miller's The New Yorker piece hit newsstands, George was so embarrassed by his failure to complete A Dance With Dragons, the seminal fifth volume in his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, that he spent the next week killing off Arya Stark in fanfiction covertly posted around the internet. Did you think he had something better to do with his time?

Martin has always come out strongly against fanfic, which is strange because the television adaptation of his novels is a Young and the Restless-style reinvention of his familiar themes and characters except that everyone is freshly showered and Jaime Lannister, the Dragonslayer, has become a wincing man-boy. I also sold my stainless steel reproduction of Jon Snow's sword Longclaw today. You don't understand how traumatic a decision that was.

It's ironic that GRRM and the boys from Lost are so mad at each other. This feud will come to a fever pitch when Carlton Cuse posts the true name of Jon Snow's mother on his twitter. Game of Thrones steals so much from Lost in its execution so far - wasn't most of Lost Matthew Fox standing breathlessly next to some sick individual and weeping like he lost his syndication checks, just like Catelyn does for Bran? Nothing would exist today if not for Lost, except maybe Hot in Cleveland, but Valerie Bertinelli's retro-sexuality would not be nearly as appreciated had it not been for Evangeline Lilly.

you guys, I think this was in A Knight's Tale

People are keen to disrespect Lost these days. All I hear is whining about Deus Ex Machina and how dumb the finale was on every single messageboard I visit. (Some enterprising Lost blogger recently bragged about keying Brian K. Vaughan's Jaguar.) This is rank hypocrisy. What exactly do you think the White Walkers of the North are, George? GRRM set up a Deus Ex Machina in the very first scene of A Song of Ice and Fire and he still hasn't paid it off in four books, and Damon Lindelof is the liar? We're about as close to uncovering the secret of Jon Snow's real mother as we are of having Daenerys return to the Seven Kingdoms, and he's taking potshots at Lost? What a world.

Instead of montage sequences, which are costly for television and require planning, Lost just had flashback sequences. Game of Thrones has used neither so far, not even recapping the outcome of the rebellion and Robert Baratheon's destruction of Rhaegar Targaryen, the man who ran off with his wife and Ned Stark's sister. The casting has been about as successful - despite traversing a desert, Daenerys' footwomen are for some reason entirely Caucasian, since Hollywood would collapse if there wasn't enough roles for Kate Beckinsale look-a-likes. Jaime Lannister has had three lines, Sean Bean still thinks he's playing Boromir, and Catelyn Stark is so unappealing that her husband abandons her in his family's castle in the first episode of the entire show. Never mention the name Sansa Stark to me again.

After Jason Momoa ruined Stargate Atlantis, he began to hone in on the part of Khal Drogo, thinking his acting skills would be improved by having no lines of dialogue. He is no Khal Drogo, the real Khal Drogo was a bigger man with pecs shaped like dandelions and a scent that was vaguely redolent of cherries. The real Khal Drogo only looks at a woman's face on YouPorn.

Likewise, the mere idea of walking a direwolf on a leash is downright retarded, Sansa. Sandor Clegane had his face burnt off, not slightly damaged, and I don't think the word "cunt" was very common in King's Landing and its environs, but I'll have to check my copy of Languages of the Seven Kingdoms. I can't believe I'm still waiting for Arya to be reunited with Nymeria, I'm going to die or join the Haley Barbour campaign if it takes any longer.

God I miss Lost. Lately all I do is complain about how Paul Ryan wants to ban color copies at the Pentagon to Donald Rumsfeld and bathe my balls in vinegar so that the closest my darling wife Lynne gets to them is my 365 photo tumblr devoted to my testicles. With Mad Men gone until 2012 and given that our next president Tim Pawlenty won't talk to me since I told him that nobody respects people from Minnesota, I required a new meme.

My Lost reviews now comprise a critical part of 21st century literature. I will never forget the time I went after tumbledore, or when Matthew Fox was so upset about how much I made fun of his acting that he called me up to complain and ended up telling me the size of Dominic Monaghan's cock. The best part of Lost (some wiseguys says the only good part of Lost, as if there had never even been a hatch) was the wonder of good fantasy, where things we previously thought impossible are revealed as load-bearing pylons of a new universe.

In its eagerness to get in hundreds of plot points per episode, Game of Thrones strays from the humble moments of magic: a singular head standing on a pike, a Maester's complicated remedies, a dwarf's broad intelligence in the shadow of his evil father, a woman alone, pregnant and fearful across the Narrow Sea. Martin initially resisted putting dragons in his high fantasy because he considered the concept boring and overdone. In the end, he blogged about how glad he was he kept them, because the lost dragons of the Seven Kingdoms became another wild element in a series full of them. When it happens on television, all we can think is that every dragon egg must eventually hatch.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his reviews of Lost here. Next week he will be indicating the size of Charlie Pace's penis with his hands. The hatch was an installation of the Dharma Initiative where Desmond listened to records and missed Penny a lot.

"Back in the Dancehalls" - Felice Brothers (mp3)

"Dallas" - Felice Brothers (mp3)

"Ponzi" - Felice Brothers (mp3)