Pandemonium broke out, with everybody and their brother jumping up and shouting out questions. I waited a few seconds and then put a finger to my lips and made "Ssshhhh!" sounds while using my other hand to direct them to sit down again. When they were sitting I said, "There, just like in the first grade. Raise your hands and wait your turn." Everybody raised a hand, and I pointed to somebody on the left. I recognized the face but not the name, and knew he worked for CBS. I glanced down at the seating chart and saw it was John Roberts. I pointed to him and said, "John."
Roberts stood up and asked, "So, your daughters aren't really going to be selling drugs and becoming prostitutes?"
I stared at him for a second. "Are you for real? You're kidding me, right? Sit down. No more silly questions. Next?" There was a stunned silence for a second when I told one of the 'elite' White House correspondents to sit down and shut up, but then another flurry of hands rose up. I decided to go with a woman this time, and found Campbell Brown from NBC. I pointed at her and said, "Campbell."
"Vice President Buckman, you don't think you should be subjected to the same scrutiny as other political figures?"
"Me? Sure, I'm fair game. My daughters? No, not at all. Now, it's your network, not mine, but if you want to report on my ditzy daughters while they are goofing around with their pals, well, it's your time and money, not mine." I looked around and found a print reporter, Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post. "Jim."
"What is your response to the comments of Rush Limbaugh about this?", he asked.
I grimaced at that. "What I'd like to know is how Rush Limbaugh managed to become the voice of family values in this country. He's on his third wife and I'm still working on my first. He has no children and I have three. My daughters are straight A students. My son is off defending the nation so this blithering idiot can spew his vileness. Yet somehow he is the one who gets to pronounce that my wife and daughters are sluts and bimbos?"
"The worst part is that all of you go along with him on this! Last night I had to sit with them and watch Tom Brokaw announce it on national television, but I could have turned to any other channel or read it in any of your papers. Many of you in this room have met my girls and my wife, and you know that these are lies and slanders, and yet you report them anyway. Here's another thing they know about out in the real world – shame!"
Somebody yelled out, "So what are you going to do about it?"
I glanced around the room but couldn't figure out who had spoken. It didn't matter at that point. "Well, I had to teach my daughters about reporters, didn't I? They've lost a piece of their innocence. From now on they'll always have to wonder if the people they meet and the boys they date think the awful things that the people in this room have said about them."
I looked over at an ashen faced Ari Fleischer and stepped back. "I think we're done here." I turned and walked down the hallway back to my office.
That night selected excerpts of my press conference made the news, and in full on The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart throwing in pithy comments along the way. He also threw in Rush's latest invective and commentary from Fox News, which couldn't figure out whether to back a Republican politician, me, or a Republican icon, Rush. They tried for both and got neither. It would have been hilarious if it didn't involve my family.
Marilyn and the girls flew down to Washington and stayed the weekend with me. They were pretty upset with some of the things they were hearing around school. I knew it would pass, but it still wasn't nice. It's one thing to hear that Rush Limbaugh or some political types were attacking me, but quite another to find it was slopping onto them. Marilyn's comment to me was simply, "I'm your first wife? Think again! I'm your only wife!"
I had to grin at that and reply, "I don't know, honey. Maybe I'm behind on the count. Maybe you need to keep me from testing the waters."
Holly and Molly both yelled, "GROSS!", and ran off to their rooms.
Marilyn tried to punch me and I wrapped her in my arms. "Gross!", she laughed.
"Gross!", I agreed.
Things were tense in the West Wing for a few days. It all blew over, as I knew it would. Rush amped up his bile for a few days until even he went over the line and he began taking heat for it, especially from his sponsors. Ari Fleischer settled down as the ruckus ended. Karl Rove hated my guts before, and hated them now.
Ahhh! The joy of politics! Oh, if I could only go back to being a simple multibillionaire.
Chapter 137: Treason
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
It was surprisingly easy to commit high treason.
By the end of July it was becoming obvious that if I had been hoping to have any effect on the future of the country it had been a delusion. They were beating a drum loudly about going to war with Iraq. Anybody moderate or who tried to point towards terrorism was fired, demoted, or ignored. I was asking all sorts of questions about sleeper cells and whether information was passing between the FBI and CIA, and was told to sit down and shut up. I heard from one of the mid-level people over at the CIA that Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were ordering intelligence estimates to be slanted heavily in the direction that Cheney and Bush wanted. He wasn't sure, but he thought some of it was being falsified.
This was something that happened in a lot of cases. Intelligence is a tricky business, and you can never really say for sure what the bad guys are up to. The analysts normally give you a spectrum of choices, such as a happy choice, the realistic choice, and the if-things-go-to-shit choice. They were busy over at Langley blowing smoke up everybody's asses, and if you weren't with the program, shut up and pack your bags. Saddam Hussein was gearing up to bring nuclear war to America, and we needed to stop him!
I tried to stop it. I stayed in contact with Richard Clarke and tried to figure out ways to highlight the possible damage coming. We even went over all the various scenarios that I knew were coming, even if they were only the ones in Tom Clancy's novels. Nothing we did was even admitted to be discussed at National Security Council meetings. I could have marched through with a brass band and a bullhorn and not been noticed.
On the domestic side, it wasn't much better. We already knew taxes were going to be lowered. While I had managed to get the original 10% decrease for the year cut to 5%, they would make up for it next year. In addition, dozens of domestic programs were going to go under the axe in the name of efficiency and deregulation. Be careful eating that burger, because while the FDA and the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control were still around, their budgets were cut in half and they no longer had any inspectors or technicians to test anything or doctors to treat you if you got sick.
Elsewhere, my disloyalty was goading Bush into an action practically unheard of in modern politics. He was planning to dump me. The Vice President is an elected official, not an appointee, so he can't be fired, only impeached. Rove was leaking to Washington that the President was unhappy with my performance and that I wasn't a team player and he wouldn't be bringing me back for the second term. There was even a quiet intimation that my family's mental health issues were surfacing in me as well. So far this was just a whisper campaign, with nobody saying anything for the record, and nobody saying where they had heard these silly rumors, but it was starting to get out. I spoke to Fletcher Donaldson the last weekend of July at the house in Hereford, and he told me he had heard some things, but without any confirmation he couldn't print it yet. I simply replied that it was three years away from the election, and he shouldn't believe everything he heard.