Broken In Brief: Cheney moves to conquer animal kingdom

KENNEDY COUNTY—A disheveled Dick Cheney was today found wandering around a fallow field, confused and malnourished, five days after he became separated from a quail hunting party at a friend’s estate in Texas. The Vice-President was found furiously stomping on an anthill before moving to the base of an oak, frothing and raving at a baby bear he had apparently chased into the upper reaches of the tree.

This, according to sources, has been part of a series of increasingly bizarre behavior on the part of the outgoing Vice-President. Some feel that the thought of leaving has driven him to despair, while other aides point to Mr. Cheney’s long held desire to hold dominion over all the world's creatures.

“I think during the hunt he just realized that there's no sense in spraying buckshot at drugged birds by the hundreds when he could just finally harness the time to bend all animals, even nature itself, to his dark will,” observed long time legal counsel and friend, David Addington. “Last we saw, he had taken off his orange hat and vest, laid down his gun and strode into the woods. We were just going to let him die of exposure. I mean, this man has so much dirt on us we’re practically slaves."

And so it would have been, had the hunting party not come across Cheney again a mere five days later. "We could see him waving some sort of large branch at a black bear cub out of the lodge window. Legally, if we could see him, then we couldn’t pretend we didn’t know where he was. Anyway, the mother bear never showed so we tranq'd Dick with a Rhino dart and dragged him back to his cage at the main house. It was only after he came to and started regurgitating chunks of bloody fur that we figured out what happened to the mother bear."

Those close to Cheney suggest this will probably be the first of many attempts his part to gain control over the animal kingdom, as his domination of both the political and corporate fields has left him bored with crushing the spirits of mere humans. Whether he will succeed is up in the air, but one thing is for certain: the Gulf Coast bear population will never be the same.