"The Yankees!? Are you kidding me? Since when do we root for the Yankees! We are fans of the Orioles!", I asked, perhaps too loudly.
Holly smiled and answered, "Uncle Mark sent them!"
"They're cute!", added her sister.
"Cute, huh? You can tell your Uncle Mark he's about to get audited by the IRS!" I took the leash from them and hooked up the dog, and handed it back. Bending over I had another sharp pain in the left side. At the minimum, I had a cracked rib or two. Wonderful! "Here! Go! Don't come back for a few years!", I said.
"Bye, Daddy!" came from the pair of them, and I got a kiss on the cheek from both of them, and they ran out of the place with Stormy romping out in front.
I looked at the others and said, "I think the rest of the speech is shot." The entire place was on the verge of a total breakdown into raucous laughter. I knew what was going to be on the news tonight. If aliens landed on the South Lawn, peeing free gasoline that tasted like chocolate and cured cancer, it would still have been only the second spot on the news. I went over to the table and sat down, feeling a sharp twinge as I did so. I picked up a pen, and it fell apart in my hands, leaking ink on my fingers. What else could possibly go wrong?! I stared at the pen for a second, and then looked back at the audience and cameras. "Have you ever had one of those days?" That was it. The place exploded in laughter.
I managed to clean my fingers with my handkerchief, in the process ruining the handkerchief and my suit, and signed the bill. Okay, it wasn't pristine and beautiful, but it was the law. I gave John the signing pen and told him the broken pen was going into the Presidential collection, and he laughed so hard he started crying. Meanwhile my side was starting to hurt more.
The end wasn't much more glorious than the rest of the day. I moved to stand up and my ribs protested loudly. By now I was in some real pain. I whispered over my shoulder to John and the Admiral that I needed some help. Once erect, they helped me inside to the clinic. I had always thought that the Physician to the President was a Navy doctor, but this guy was an Air Force colonel. My last physical was under the previous administration, when the Physician was a lady Naval captain. The White House Medical Unit is practically a small scale hospital, with almost a dozen doctors, nurses, and technicians. Ninety percent of what they do is actually care for the routine miseries of everybody who works there, plus the tourists who pass out while waiting in line for the tour.
In this case, I found myself stripped half naked and under an X-ray machine inside of about two minutes. The diagnosis? Two cracked ribs and one broken rib on my left side! Cannonball Stormy did a wonderful job on me. I would have to thank my daughters somehow. They taped me up and sent me up to the Residence, where I took a pain pill and had a drink. That pretty much blew the rest of my day.
That night, the evening news had me as the first few minutes, both with Stormy's antics and then with Will Brucis informing the press corps about what happens when a 135 pound irresistible force meets a 195 pound immoveable object. Later that evening, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart announced, "He signed the bill with broken ribs! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, whether you like him or not, this guy is one tough son-of-a-[bleeped]!" There was also plenty of grief from Yankees fans, although Mets fans seemed to appreciate me, as did pretty much every Marylander (fans of the Orioles.) Ari informed me that I was going to have to attend a Yankees baseball game as soon as possible. Fine, maybe they could lose, the bastards! Then I got grief from some right wing preachers about my daughter's immoral behavior – the pot and porn tank tops – and how I was a bad role model for the nation's youth. For that one we simply said that the twins were both 18 years old and that I was their father, not their owner. Then I had Marilyn chew on them for a while. I couldn't wait to see what trouble they got into in the fall when they went to college.
The worst part was poor Stormy. I think she knew she was in the doghouse, in more ways than one. She tried to climb up onto my recliner that evening and I had to push her away. She would have really busted me up if I had let her crawl onto me. She whined until I went to bed and let her lie down on my right side. For such a gigantic dog she could be so pathetic!
Chapter 152: Changes
2002-2003
I spent the rest of the summer letting my ribs heal, which definitely put a crimp in my krav maga training and workouts. Doc Tubb heard, probably from the Residence staff, that I had a beer with my pain pill, and promptly chewed me out and put me on ibuprofen instead of anything more amusing. Marilyn gave me an insufferably superior look when she heard that. The twins were actually concerned that after jumping on me and then landing on the ground, Stormy might have been hurt. They were less concerned about their beloved father. I simply looked at Marilyn and asked, "When do they go to college?"
She sighed and smiled. "Not soon enough!"
"Think it will seem lonely? Just you, me, and hundreds of staffers and servants?"
She simply rolled her eyes at that.
Dick Cheney managed to self-destruct over the summer. He could have been a major pain in the keister if he had decided to mount a primary challenge in 2004, and for quite awhile it sounded like he was going to do just that. By August, however, he was finished. The Special Joint Committee had issued subpoenas to damn near everybody with any link to the intelligence system prior to 9-11, and some people cooperated and some didn't. Radziwill, the State Department flunky who had tried to shut down the DIA's Able Danger program turned State's Evidence in order to keep out of jail, and he fingered Scooter Libby. Scooter was caught perjuring himself, and ended up on trial by the end of the summer.
Also on trial was Dick Cheney, who refused to cooperate. He was too smart to lie, so he clammed up and claimed executive privilege. The administration said 'No' on this, which did not sit well with him, so he sued me. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that he had no standing to claim executive privilege, and a surprisingly fast appeal was turned down. At that point he went in front of Congress and after being sworn in, made a statement. "On the advice of counsel, I hereby refuse to testify and I invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination." Then he stood up and walked out of the hearing room, while the rest of the room erupted in shouting and recriminations, with the gavel banging and demands to return under penalty of a Contempt of Congress charge.
The contempt charge passed the committee unanimously, though Cheney had enough friends in Congress so the House vote wasn't unanimous. It made no difference. There was a lot of rigamarole surrounding it, and the Counsel's office kept me apprised, but the end result was that Cheney pled guilty to the contempt charge but didn't have to testify or admit to anything. Cheney treated it as an acquittal, but not so the rest of the country. Brewster McRiley, my long-time campaign consultant, told me that Cheney was sniffing around the Republican Party moneymen, and was getting nowhere.
The coup de grace came in August, when Scooter pled guilty to one count of perjury and one count of obstructing justice, and was sentenced to 8 months in Club Fed and a $100,000 fine. There was the de rigueur request for a pardon, which I refused. Cheney was invited on This Week to give his opinion. He stated that, "President Buckman's cold-hearted and cynical refusal to pardon an honorable public servant was akin to leaving a man on the battlefield!"