Cheney’s green parka and boots stand out at solemn ceremony
I’ve spent a few days pondering this silliness, and I’m still no closer to having forged some sort of understanding. Apparently, some moronic fashion writer at the Washington Post has her panties in a twist because Dick Cheney showed up wearing a parka that would have looked at home in an ice-fishing hut on a northern Minnesota lake. To anyone who has not tried to sit through a ceremony of any sort in sub-freezing temperatures, this might seem like something akin to sacrilege. For those of us who grew up in colder climes, we understand that there are times when function and warmth trump conventional sartorial norms. Hey, it’s not as if Cheney showed up in a purple velour rhinestone-studded jumpsuit.
OK, so perhaps it wasn’t the somber, deathly dull grey that politicians are expected to drape themselves in. Still, did this self-appointed Fashion Polizei bother to look at the picture, or perhaps at a thermometer? It was f——-g cold in Oswiecim, Poland that day- and yes, if you look at the picture, that IS snow falling. It had to have been absolutely miserable sitting outside in that weather. Both the VP and his wife, Lynne, look more than moderately uncomfortable…as does most everyone else.
Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan described Cheney’s look at the sober and dignified 60th anniversary service as “the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”
“Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood,” Givhan wrote in Friday’s Post, also mocking Cheney’s knit ski cap embroidered with the words “Staff 2001” and his brown, lace-up hiking boots. “The vice president looked like an awkward child amid the well-dressed adults,” she said.
Look, y’all, there are bigger problems in play here than the “appropriateness” (or lack thereof) of Cheney’s outerwear. Hate him all you want, but let’s at least do it for the right reasons, shall we? He and George W. Bush are responsible for the deaths of more than 1400 American soldiers, as well as untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, perhaps upwards of 100,000. Hate Cheney for being a thug, a war criminal, and a hypocrite, but why begrudge him wanting to be warm on what had to be a miserably cold day?
Besides, why does anyone care what a Washington Post fashion writer thinks about Cheney’s outerwear? If that is all she can find to be angry about, I would submit that the woman clearly needs to start paying closer attention to what is going on in the world.
