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| VP Cheney sits next to Israeli President Moshe Katzav at Auschwitz commemoration. (AP) |
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By Bruce S. Ticker
January 31, 2005
Perhaps it is poetic justice that Vice President Cheney was prominently dissed for his fashion sense.
Few people more than I regret that the voting margin in Ohio or Florida four months ago did not pull in the opposite direction.
Yet I will stand up -- if not quite fight to the death -- to defend Cheney's right to dress as he pleases.
The Washington Post last Friday (Jan. 28) devoted the top of its popular Style section to a story by staff writer Robin Givhan who dressed down Cheney, metaphorically speaking, for his down-home choice of attire at an outdoor gathering of world leaders marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious Nazi death camp in southern Poland.
Givhan writes that Cheney, who represented the United States at the ceremony which was held on the grounds of this death factory, "stood out in a sea of blackcoated world leaders because he was wearing an olive.drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood ... The vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults."
She goes on to scold Cheney for his headwear, reporting, "Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not ... any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words 'Staff2001'. It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag."
The reporter summed up the contrast thus: "They (other leaders) were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event. The vice president ... was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower."
Now hold on here. Let's hope Givhan's disdain is not contagious. Before anyone compares Cheney's questionable fashion sense to President Reagan's trip to Bitburg, Germany -- when he was chastised for visiting a cemetery where SS creeps were buried -- we must bear in mind that Cheney was helping all of humankind, including the Jewish people, by virtue of his presence.
I can bash Cheney with the best of them on a wide range of issues, but not over this. It is too personal. I am grateful that our vice president flew thousands of miles and showed up at all to pay his respects to my people and the many other victims of Hitler's terror. As the grandson of Jewish European immigrants, maybe I had relatives who were gassed to death at Auschwitz.
Anyone who makes an issue of Cheney's attire would be trifling with his role at the memorial service. Cheney performed a mitzvah by telling the world with his presence that the Holocaust must never be forgotten nor these atrocities repeated.
Clothes don't unmake the mensch, though I do wonder how he dresses when he operates a snow blower.
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