Birth and Death: On HuffPost's One Year Anniversary and Dick Cheney's Take on the Grim Reaper

I've been thinking a lot about birth and death today.

Birth because this is HuffPost's one year anniversary. And what an amazing 12 months it's been, thanks to all of you in the HuffPost community: our staff, our bloggers, our readers and, of course, to George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Scott McClellan, Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Mike Brown, Tim Russert, Patrick Fitzgerald, Porter Goss, and all the rest who have made this such a fun and fascinating year to blog about.

And Death because of the new Vanity Fair profile of Dick Cheney, written by Todd Purdum. Talk about mixed messages. The story offers two very different pictures of how the vice president regards death.

On the one hand, we learn that Cheney always brings a chemical-biological HazMat suit with him wherever he goes. Wouldn't want to be caught unprepared if those phantom Iraqi WMD ever materialize, I suppose. The article also reports that Cheney once told a friend that his motorcade takes a different route every day "so that 'The Jackal' can't get me." Still unclear is whether Cheney's paranoia is directed at famed terrorist Carlos the Jackal (now serving a life sentence in France), Edward Fox (who played the assassin in the classic 1973 thriller "Day of the Jackal") or Bruce Willis (who took on the role in the crummy 1997 remake). In any case, the man certainly seems concerned about meeting his maker. No, not Halliburton. The Almighty.

Yet in the very same profile, Cheney, a man who has had a minimum of four heart attacks, describes himself as "fatalistic" about his precarious condition. "I don't even think about it most of the time," he says. "You do those things a prudent man would do, and I live with it." Prudent? Is that how the most powerful #2 in history would describe, as Purdum recounts, a lunch at which Cheney cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece? Sounds more like a man daring Death to take his best shot.

I can just picture Cheney taking on the Max Von Sydow role in "The Seventh Seal." Death arrives and sits down to play a game of chess. "Go fuck yourself!" says Cheney, taking another bite of his heavily salted steak.

I guess it's easy to be fearless in the face of death when you're even grimmer than the Grim Reaper.