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.

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)