Washington DC - The Bush Administration will go down in history as the "Prankster Presidency," according to revelations made in a classified chapter of former Vice President Dick Cheney's recently published memoirs.
The top-secret material, which shows George W. Bush and Cheney collaborating on a series of elaborate pranks, was made public today by NetSlips, the American version of WikiLeaks.
"The CIA had ordered Dick Cheney to burn this chapter of his memoirs," said NetSlips founder and president Brice Villavich. "Instead, he locked it in a safe deposit box and had his dog cremated so he would have ashes to hand over to the CIA. We learned how to get into the safe deposit box from an old Robert Redford movie."
According to NetSlips, the chapter documents that Bush and Cheney personally created the torture interrogation technique called waterboarding. "We were lounging around in the White House pool one afternoon, when we decided to see who could hold his breath underwater longer," Cheney wrote.
"Of course, with my bad ticker, I knew I had no chance to win. So I flipped George over and had the water slowly trickle into his nostrils. After the Secret Service got through beating me up and resuscitating him, we looked at each other and knew we had something for those godless terrorists."
The Iraq War was another significant product of a Bush/Cheney pranking session. "Someone at Halliburton, the defense contractor where I used to work, figured out how to freeze dry a cheeseburger value meal," the classified chapter said. "It looked and smelled like crap, but George and I figured it was good enough for ground troops, who will eat anything.
"So we pranked the notion of weapons of mass destruction to scare everyone silly. Then we started the Iraq War as our solution to the 'problem' to give us an excuse to put thousands of troops in the field. Hungry troops.
"Halliburton sold millions of the cheeseburger combos. And they must've been delicious because they wound up costing $55 of pure profit apiece. That's why they call them value meals."
The classified chapter also covered Cheney's hunting accident in which he shot a companion, revealing that it was a prank gone wrong.
"George was supposed to have the Secret Service put blanks in my shotgun. But he wound up taking a nap instead. So the joke was on me when I pulled the trigger. And I must say, I got a real kick out of seeing the expression on that guy's bloody face. I don't think he was initially in on the prank, but I bet he remembers it every day of his life, especially if he uses a mirror in the morning."
NetSlips reports that declassifying the prankster chapter might turn out to be an unexpected boon for Dick Cheney. He has expressed interest in using the material to write a follow-up book, tentatively titled "The Joke's on You."
