Chapter 5: Campaign: Fall 2008

Throughout the two-months presidential campaign Cheney’s official slogan remained “Trust Me.” Cheney sprinkled every speech with “Trust Me”’s.

His Official Poster:

Some of Cheney’s streetwise young supporters plastered cities with posters bearing an edgier slogan recalling his defiant curse hurled at the Phelps sympathizers:

Embittered political artists on the left responded:

Johnny Talbot was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1988 - the last full year of Reagan’s presidency. His full name was Johnny Ronald Talbot.

Johnny was doomed to wholesomeness. With freckles, a towhead, and a cowlick it was hard to be anything but wholesome.

He believed in Richard Cheney with every GOP-red fiber of his Republican heart. Every weekend Johnny showed up at eight a.m. at the Topeka office of the Cheney for President Campaign HQ. He wore a dark blue suit and black tie and impeccably-shined black leather shoes.

Johnny was a political junky and he gloried in talking politics with real pros at Cheney’s campaign HQ. Johnny held his own on the myriad benefits of lower taxes and the wisdom of diverting public school funding to private schools. He decried the horrors of homosexualism and excelled at enumerating the horrors of Islamofascism. He held all the right opinions about the slippery slope from Darwin to Dachau and Johnny positively shone at excoriating the traitorous socialist atheist whining gun-grabbing Clinton-worshipping DemoncRats.

Johnny loved to canvass for Cheney. The canvass organizers at Cheney HQ would pair Johnny with an older volunteer who wasn’t a talker. The two would walk door to door informing people about the many virtues of Richard Cheney and making sure Cheney supporters knew where their polling place was.

Johnny would do the talking and with his twelve-year-old enthusiasm and confidence he charmed a few undecideds into voting for his man. Johnny’s strength came from his rock-solid certainty in every belief he held. His delivery was impassioned and grounded in absolute conviction.

Johnny canvassed for six hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday after church.

He wrote letters to the editor extolling Cheney and two were printed in the Topeka Capital Journal: one praising Cheney’s foresight in invading Iraq and one explaining that although Cheney had a homosexual daughter that didn’t mean he was soft on homosexualism.

Johnny was a quiet, well-liked but not popular student in elementary school. His teachers loved his patience and diligence and cheerfulness. His third grade teacher, Miss Stanley, commented on his report card, “What a delightful boy! Needs work on penmanship.”

At age eleven Johnny started his first serious business. Galvanized by a newspaper ad touting fortunes in rabbit husbandry Johnny built hutches for forty does and made a profit on his second crop of long-eared fryers and tanned pelts. He gave his rabbits numbers, not names.

Johnny's skill with explosives was rooted in his eighth grade rocket mania. He soon graduated from prefabs kits to welding custom designs. He powered his rockets with lathe-turned nozzles and handmade fuel – zinc dust mixed with sulfur, saltpeter and sugar caramelized perilously over a Bunsen burner.

When he finished a new rocket he'd bike out to a field beyond the new housing development. He'd set up his launch stand then count down from 10 and BLAST OFF FFFFFFSSSSSHHHHHHhhhhhh… the rocket shot up out of sight. What a rush!

When one of his rockets exploded he dug out shrapnel embedded a foot into in oak tree. He started to experiment with pipes filled with fuel and closed at both ends. He found instruction for pipe bombs on the Internet and he was hooked.

It was all about the noise and the blast. Johnny wasn't destructive. The biggest thing he blasted was a hollow old oak tree that was ready to fall anyway. The neatest was a rusty washing machine.

Usually Johnny biked far out of town and buried the bomb in dirt and blasted a big hole in the ground. He challenged himself to get close to the blast. Too close one time - the dirt was loose - but the boy was lucky: he took a dirt clod hard in the face and dug a pebble out of his thigh. Told his mother a detailed story about a bicycle accident. Felt guilty but couldn't risk her forbidding his experiments. Thanked God on his knees that night for sparing him and promised never to lie to his mother again and promised to stand way back behind something from now on amen.

Johnny was a product of a mixed marriage. His mother, June Talbot, was a red-blooded Republican patriot. His father, Ralph, was irredeemably a bleeding-heart Democrat stubborn beyond rational argument in his liberalism and invincible in his socialistic ignorance.

In ninth grade Johnny's mother yanked her children from the godless public school system. Home schooling. His mother taught Johnny and his little sister Donna all they needed to know about the world.

Johnny was a congenital conservative. His mother’s home schooling hardened his view of the world and his place in it.

Johnny hated the Islamofascists. He despised liberal fascists, excepting his father, whom he loved and pitied in equal parts. He was a fan of Podhoretz and Bolton and Hinderaker and Ledeen and Woo and Gingrich and Nyquist and Coulter.

He revered Ronald Reagan above everyone but his God and his Parents.

George W. Bush was a puzzling disappointment to Johnny. How could President Bush be right on so many issues: Iraq, death taxes, monitoring of terrorists, Guantanamo – and be so terribly wrong on the growth of federal spending, the dangers of Islamofascism (Bush called Islam a religion of peace, for crying out loud!), socialized drugs for old people, and - worst sin of all - Bush wanted to give illegal aliens an express lane to citizenship rather than repelling them at the border with a fence and beefed-up patrols?

Johnny was a right-wing blog junky. He visited his favorite websites – michellemalkin.com, powerline.com, redstate.org – a couple of times a day. His home on the Internet was the premiere conservative website Freerepublic.com. Johnny posted under the username of JohnnyTremain. Johnny subscribed wholeheartedly to the heart of the conservative website’s credo:

“As a conservative site, Free Republic is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun, pro-limited government, pro-private property rights, pro-limited taxes, pro-capitalism, pro-national defense, pro-freedom, and-pro[sic] America. We oppose all forms of liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, totalitarianism, anarchism, government enforced atheism, abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, racism, wacko environmentalism, judicial activism, etc.*”

Johnny printed out this Statement and tacked it to the wall above his computer.

Johnny had a vision of an innocent, biblical, capitalist Utopia. Every man would have his shoulder to the wheel of commerce. Young workers would take care of their elders. Ambitious people would build small businesses and through honest toil and superior judgment build them into big business, employing the less capable at reasonable hourly rates. Parents would teach their children everything they needed to know. Abortions would be unheard of; couples would marry to have babies. The wisest and most conservative businessmen would be voted to high office and rule lightly and cheaply. The military would employ nothing but ruthless heroes. Sundays would be a day of church and feasting and football year round. TV and movies would be purged of filthy words and lewdness and be filled with wholesome entertainment, classics, and educational documentaries.

Regulation of business would be minimal. Everyone, no matter how poor or rich, would pay 10% of their income for government services.

Fathers would be strong and mothers holy drudges. Friends would be buddies and true to the end.

An admirable dream if you ignore its inevitable starving old folks, exploited kids, ravaged forests, tainted food, and crumbling infrastructure.

Johnny’s hard work for Richard Cheney drew the attention of high officials in the Republican Party of Kansas. When Cheney won the election Johnny Talbot was one of twenty Kansan youngster who were invited to attend Richard Cheney’s inauguration in Washington, D.C.