Vice President Cheney walks into YouTube and says to himself, Yeesh, I don't like the looks of this place. Too much exposure and transparency. And Cheney is right. Before he knows it, somebody has posted audio of an interview with him in 1991, when he was defense secretary, arguing against a military invasion of Iraq:
"For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who's going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire," Cheney said at the time.
The veep would like to cut and run, but YouTube is something like the Hotel California: You can try to check out anytime you like, but you can never, never leave.
So he's trapped there with his own ironic words for all to hear. About 28,000 people have listened to them since they were posted last August.
Nora the Piano-Playing Cat is neither pastor nor policy-maker. She is a gray, 3-year-old feline from Center City. But Nora is in YouTube with the cardinal and the veep because she can tickle the ivories.
She actually sits on a piano bench and taps a few keys with her paws. It's not really "music"; if you paid $100 for a ticket to the Kimmel Center and Nora appeared on stage, you would chuckle for a moment or two and then sue somebody. But YouTube is free, so you're perfectly content to watch Nora for two minutes, tapping on piano keys, playing middle C or whatever, over and over: Look at that! A cute kitty playing the piano!
In the past month, more than 1.2 million people have watched Nora on YouTube. The superficial have spoken.
So the cardinal turns to the vice president and says, "I cannot believe that a cat on the Internet is so incredibly popular."
And the veep replies, "I know. And I keep getting spam from somebody named 'Tabby.' "
