Ron Suskind’s new book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” explores Vice President Dick Cheney’s view that if there’s a 1 percent chance terrorists might detonate a nuclear bomb in an American city, the government must act as if there’s a 100 percent chance. Despite the guffawing this elicited from administration critics, it strikes me as eminently sensible. (If there were a 1 percent chance the snake in your back yard would kill your child, wouldn’t 1 percent equal 100 percent for you too?)

– Jonah Goldberg

We live in a neighborhood in the LA hills with very few pedestrians, and my friends always call before visiting. So I was a little surprised when the doorbell rang. I was more surprised when it was Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Your backyard is overrun with poisonous snakes,” he said. “And they’re about to kill your children.”

Then he shut the door in my face. There was a roaring noise of engines turning over, and a trembling in the floorboards.

I ran to the back of the house, where our dining room window looks out on the downward sloping hillside we indulgently call “a backyard.” Cheney was directing two big yellow backhoes into position.

“Snakes?” I yelled, trying to be heard over the diesel engines.

“Horrible poisonous snakes,” he nodded, speaking in that familiar flat monotone. “Mambas. Cobras. Pit vipers.”

The backhoes started digging into the dirt, tearing up the brush and shrubbery.

“How do you know?” I yelled. “We haven’t seen any. Ever.”

“Who you going to trust,” he said, “Me? Or some snake?”

“Couldn’t we just look for the snakes, first? See if they’re actually there?”

“Too dangerous,” he said, barely deigning to shake his head. “Naïve. Foolish. You go look for them, it’s just what they want. Then they bite your children. On their eyeballs.”

The blades of one of the backhoes was scraping away the dirt from one of the steel supports that holds our house up. The exposed metal looked scarily naked, and I thought I could feel the house sway.

“I don’t have any children!” I yelled.

“You might someday,” he said. “You look fertile. And you’ve got to take an aggressive posture. Can’t wait till you and your husband have sexual intercourse, the spermatozoa travels up the vaginal canal and then the fallopian tubes, penetrates the egg, creating a zygote, then the zygote implants, becomes a fetus, develops, is born, grows into a toddler, then comes back here and pow, gets swallowed by a python. That’s what they want us to do. That’s what we did under previous administrations. It’s a sign of weakness.”

“Pythons aren’t poisonous….” I said, weakly. Destabilized by the digging, a huge portion of what had been my yard slid down the hill and into the pool of my neighbor downslope. He came out, saw the wreckage, and began screaming. Then he went inside. I could see him, through the French doors of his pool patio, loading a shotgun.

The engines on the backhoes quieted. My backyard was gone. Instead, my house swayed nervously on naked steel pillars jutting out of what looked like the side of a moon crater. Angry muttering came up from my armed neighbor below.

Cheney nodded with what I assume was grim satisfaction and directed the backhoes to drive away.

“You’re going to leave it like this?” I said.

“Our concern was the snakes,” he said. “Now, I’m sure, the natural yearning of the earth to blossom and regenerate will restore your yard. I anticipate you’ll be greeted with flowers. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve heard reports of possible snakes in Encino.”

Later on, the Halliburton Company came and installed a two hundred thousand dollar decorative granite waterfall, which immediately slid down the hill into my neighbors yard, which made him even madder, so now I can’t even turn on the lights because he keeps shooting at them. But it was a nice gesture.