Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

"But it's funny!" As a comedian, that's always my immediate reaction. Somehow,
though, I can't say, "But it's funny!" to the commander of the 86th Airlift Wing.
So the Taliban Cheerleaders bit? Gone.
Still, we had a great time, a whirlwind tour with stops at bases in Sicily, Bosnia, and Camp
Bondsteel in Kosovo. It was my third trip in as many years to Kosovo. There's no airstrip at
Bondsteel. So each time I went, we'd chopper in on Chinooks from Macedonia, flying over
the rugged Sar Mountains, which tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians had traversed to escape
the ethnic cleansing that President William Jefferson Clinton finally put an end to.
On my first USO tour, as we flew over the Kosovo countryside, we could see below
us the burned out roofs of ethnic Albanian homes that had been torched, right next door to
Serb homes with TV antennae on their intact roofs. That was Europe, 1999.
After Milosevic had thrown in the towel in June of that year, U.S. peacekeeping
forces seized about a thousand acres of farmland not that far from the Macedonian border. On
my first trip to Bond steel, that December, the camp had been under construction. Soldiers
slept in wooden barracks and used makeshift latrines. Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton-a
company you might have heard of—was the contractor.
Two years later, on my third trip, Bondsteel was looking like a base stateside, with
twenty-five kilometers of roads and over three hundred buildings housing nearly seven thousand
troops. There was even a Burger King. I was told that for every burger consumed by a
GI at Camp Bondsteel, Brown & Root took a cut. And Dick Cheney received a coupon.
It reminded me of an exchange from the 2000 vice presidential debate. Citing the
accomplishments of the Clinton/Gore years, Joe Lieberman alluded to Cheney's $20 million
figure send-off from Halliburton: "And I see, Dick, from the newspapers, that you're better
off than you were eight years ago."
That got a laugh. But Cheney came back with a topper. "And I can tell you, Joe, that
the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." That got laughter and applause. Cheney
had gotten the best of Lieberman. And in an election that was decided by 537 votes, you
could reasonably point to that moment and say it changed the outcome.
Of course, what Cheney said was not entirely true. It was, in fact, a bald-faced lie. In
addition to benefiting from the unprecedented expansion of the entire economy during the