humor

Edward "Baron" von Kloberg
January 9, 1942 - May 1, 2005

Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo got its name in 590 AD, after St. Gregory the Great, while leading a procession to pray for the cessation of the plague, saw the archangel Michael sheathing his sword on top of the fortress. This vision, he believed (accurately, as it would turn out) announced the end of the plague.

It took only about four seconds for Edward von Kloberg III, another kind of plague altogether, to travel from a parapet atop Castel Sant’Angelo to his unfriendly end on a street 52 yards below, but an exit had been on his mind for some time. Months earlier, this lobbyist of choice for dictators, tyrants, and mass executioners had called the Washington Post to arrange an interview that he hoped would lead to “a better understanding of his life.”

Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney
January 30, 1941 - Late yesterday afternoon

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do you any good if you lose,” Dick Cheney, first appointed to office by Richard Nixon, told journalist Tim Russert in 1976. And it could be argued that until his 8th and final heart attack late yesterday afternoon at his Wyoming ranch, Dick Cheney never did truly lose, despite bringing scandal, ethics investigations, and eventual doom to just about every administration he worked for. By demonstrating his loyalty to an aggressive and frequently extra-legal realpolitik intentionally divorced from the realm of ethics--and getting away with it--this avid chili lover, “stump” of a high school football player from Wyoming, who dropped out of Yale, was twice nabbed for drunk driving, and who shot rabbits, birds, a hunting partner, and other animals in his free time, became a grimacingly enduring icon of American business and politics.