Juice Crumbs

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly unearthed Pentagon e-mail about Halliburton contracts in Iraq on Tuesday prompted fresh calls on Capitol Hill for probes into whether Vice President Dick Cheney helped his old firm get the deals.

It said Douglas Feith, who reports to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, approved arrangements for the contract to rebuild Iraq’s oil industry “contingent on informing WH (White House) tomorrow. We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s (vice president’s) office.”

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A true story:

One of my mom’s favorite stories about me dates back to when I was three years old and starting my first year of nursery school. I remember enough about Cookiegate to attest (to my everlasting shame) that it is in fact the truth.

I’d had some trepidation about the start of my academic career. In fact, I remember telling my parents that. I said, “Mom, Dad, I have some trepidation about the start of my academic career.” I’m paraphrasing, of course. However, I did get the thought across, and I was consoled with the one fact guaranteed to quell my fears and spark my interest in formal education:

Every day at nursery school, I was told, every child is given a snack of juice and cookies.

My raging sweet tooth would not be denied, and so I gladly headed off to Robin Hood Country Day School and was introduced to the kind, rotund Miss Barbara, or - as I immediately began to think of her - the Lady Who Would in Short Order Provide Juice and Cookies.

That afternoon, returning home, my mom grilled me about my day. Yes, I answered, the sandbox was well appointed and cleverly situated. The playground was up to snuff. Miss Barbara was indeed a kind lady, and the other children made no attempts to kill me or sully my good name. All in all, a satisfying start to my school days. But for one detail: When my mother asked about the long-anticipated juice and cookies, my face became a mask of incomprehension and betrayal.

“No,” I told her. “There were no juice and cookies. They didn’t give us any juice and cookies.”

To her credit, my mother rectified the situation immediately, and I sat down at the kitchen table and enjoyed a healthy serving of juice and several cookies.

This continued for at least a week: The going off to nursery school, the return, the reporting of good times that were curiously juice-and-cookieless, the early afternoon snack. My mother became frustrated with Robin Hood Country Day School, and began to make noises about calling them in reference to the missing Snack Time.

It was at that point, apparently, that the juice started flowing at Robin Hood.

I’d return home bearing impeccably colored-in pictures and original artworks (which, no doubt showed a precocious and exciting burgeoning talent. Those early works, sadly, have been lost to history), regaling my mom with tales of athletic and academic prowess and my rapid advancement up to the highest ranks of the social hierarchy. But, I’d conclude with some gravity and a sense of tragic betrayal, there’d been no cookies. Only juice.

Cookies would then be served, along with sweet justice.

Around the time that my mother was definitely going to phone Robin Hood Country Day School and enquire as to why her second-born son was being denied foodstuffs that were clearly guaranteed in the brochure, I returned home one day in a state of extreme filthiness. I cannot say what caused me to become so soiled during my academic day, only that I was by all reports covered in dirt from head to toe. In any event, my mother rushed me upstairs with alacrity and deposited me in the bathtub.

It was there, as I sat in the tub, that my mother noticed an unmistakable component to the layers of grime I was covered in: My mouth was ringed by the bright-red stain of juice recently quaffed. And to that ring there clung, again unmistakably, a profusion of cookie crumbs.

Though it may not reflect well on my mother, I must tell you that at this point she chose to indulge in a form of entrapment. [Had I possessed the foresight to engage an attorney in such matters, this whole mess could have been avoided. Sadly, the idea of hiring legal representation in these cases didn’t occur to me until I was well into the first grade.]

“So,” my mother asked, ever so slowly and gently. “How was nursery school today?” I immediately launched into tales of good times and personal triumphs. She was softening me up, the minx.

“Uh-huh,” she remarked with the kind of infinite gentleness that should’ve tipped me off right away. “And were you given juice and cookies today?”

“No,” I replied, almost reflexively. “Just juice. No cookies.” Already the thought of the sweet snack that would follow my ablutions was filling my brain.

“Then,” asked my mother, seizing the moment. “What are these!?” And she pointed to my face, one index finger even touching my muzzle and rolling the incriminating crumbs around my lips so that their presence could not be denied.

To my credit, I didn’t miss a beat. Trapped, caught in a lie, I attempted to brazen it out. I looked straight at her, my eyes already brimming with tears but still defiant, and I asserted boldly:

“Those are juice crumbs!”

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“Juice crumbs” became shorthand in my household for bald-faced (but undeniably creative) lies. I don’t know what lesson I learned that day - no punishment that my parents inflicted could have counterbalanced the benefits reaped from several weeks of double portions of cookies. But the incident did lay the groundwork for a dialog that would eventually make an honest man of me.

My point should be obvious here. Dick Cheney has been caught with a clownlike splash of juice stains and cookie crumbs surrounding his dry and bizarrely asymmetrical lips. The recently unearthed email contradicts everything Cheney and his office have claimed about their total lack of involvement with the no-bid Iraqi reconstruction contracts for Halliburton.

It’s hard to go from claims of “no involvement” to “pre-approved the deal.” Cheney and his people are going to try to find a way, however. They’ll twist and turn, calling the author of the email ignorant or misinformed, claiming the approval for those multibillion dollar contracts was offered by a couple of the VP’s summer interns who never even met Cheney, pointing out the enormous sacrifices and good works done by the Halliburton corporation, insisting that their scrupulous concern over a scandal surrounding Cheney’s involvement caused them to involve Cheney as a means of proving his non-involvement, accusing those who pursue the matter of living in the past and neglecting the pressing issue of the War on Terrorism, etc.

They’ll try all of that, and maybe it’ll help mitigate or confuse the scandal. But it’ll all be juice crumbs, plain and simple. There were cookies, and Cheney ate them. Take it from someone who’s been there.