Dick Cheney's Ambulance

By: Sheila Hartney

Dick Cheney is a heartbeat away from the presidency. Dick Cheney's own heartbeat is none too reliable at times, so we've been told. But there have been no reports of ill health on his part in recent months. So why does he travel with an ambulance?

He came to Overland Park, KS, on Monday, September 23, 2002, to fund-raise for Adam Taff, who's trying to unseat two-term Democrat Dennis Moore for Congress. Republican fund-raiser in Republican Kansas, big yawn. But what's this? At the very tail of the motorcade which brought him to the Ritz Charles, was an ambulance. Big, white and red, lights flashing, as if racing to a hospital. But it was simply part of the Vice-President's motorcade.

So what's going on here? Does Cheney always travel with an ambulance as part of his entourage? Why? Is his health so bad, so precarious, that he needs emergency equipment available at all times? If that's so, why has this not been reported before?

Maybe every time we hear that he's back in his bunker, he's really in a medical facility somewhere, tubes running in and out his body.

Is there a conspiracy of silence here?

It's happened before. Sixty years ago no one in the press reported how sick, how frail, how close to death Franklin Roosevelt was as he planned his run for a fourth term as President. Yet those around him knew, and they engineered the replacement of the then Vice President, Henry Wallace, with an unknown Missouri Senator, thought to be more malleable. And so it was, less than three months into Roosevelt's fourth term that Harry Truman became President.

The current situation is an odd inversion of that in 1944. It's widely believed that Cheney is the real man behind the curtain, the one who truly runs the current administration. Yet, if his health is so bad that he can rarely appear in public and needs be accompanied by an ambulance wherever he goes, why is this news being withheld? What else are we not being told?