Lynne Cheney parody draws White House ire
March 6, 2003 7:13 AM Subscribe
Lynne Cheney parody draws White House ire An Internet lampoon of Vice President Dick Cheney's wife is no laughing matter at the White House, which has asked a satirist to remove pictures of her - complete with red clown noses - from his
Web site.
But the New York Civil Liberties Union struck back Wednesday on behalf of John A. Wooden, 31, threatening a lawsuit to protect his First Amendment rights to parody the White House and Bush officials on his site, whitehouse.org.
posted by turbanhead (56 comments total)
- While chair of the NEH, asked for $187 million in funding. A short time after leaving the post, called for the NEH's abolishment.
- While NEH chair, called the National History Standards Project her "single most important legacy." Three years later, called it "politically correct to a fare-thee-well."
- While NEH chair, opposed less than one percent of the grant requests that reached her desk for approval. After leaving, described her heroic and solitary fight to hold back a flood of politically motivated applicants that ended in defeat because "one can hold back the ocean only so long."
- "Lynne Cheney has been on a mission for over a decade now to try to clamp down on dissent on campus, and to clamp down on multiculturalist perspectives in education." -- Hugh Gusterson, MIT professor of anthropology and science and technology studies, one of the academics listed on a anti-American blacklist by an organization she founded
- Repeatedly maligned the standards project for not being a comprehensive textbook of American history, even though it was not a textbook at all -- instead, the project was a framework of suggestions for making the subject more inclusive. As Timothy Noah described in Slate, "Cheney ... proved to be such a transparent phony that sympathetic panel critics like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Patrick Diggins had to denounce her."
- While at the NEH, criticized colleges for shifting away from traditional Western Civilization courses toward global history and culture instead of treating the American experience as the high point of world history
- Recommended Carol Iannone for the NEH advisory panel after Iannone said that giving Pulitzer Prizes and other awards to African-American writers Alice Walker and Toni Morrison exemplified "the democratic dictatorship of mediocrity"
- In 1995, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing a vocational school-to-work bill for encouraging women to seek "nontraditional employment."
- Testified before Congress that no government money should ever fund historical research unless it portrays the American past in a favorable light.
- Campaigned actively for the first President Bush while NEH chair, in spite of the long-time expectation the position was non-partisan.
- Claimed in her book Telling the Truth that liberal postmodernism was to blame for onlookers who danced and celebrated when a Philadelphia ice-cream vendor was killed in 1994, writing, "Intellectual elites do no one a favor by sending through society messages that there is no external reality in which we all participate, that there is only the game of the moment, the entertainment of the day."
- At an American Enterprise Institute panel discussion after Monicagate, she criticized Hillary Clinton for holding her husband's hand, saying, "It is just so distressing to me."
- And my personal favorite, claims not to remember the plot of the 1981 novel Sisters, which she wrote, an Old West feminist romance novel in which women "band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted."
posted by rcade at 1:27 PM on March 6, 2003 
posted by mosch at 7:26 AM on March 6, 2003