Lynne Cheney's 'extravagant flirtations'

Kurt Andersen has an interesting column in New York magazine in which he is discussing how he views the news and events during a presidential election cycle.

And in it he makes a casual reference to Lynne Cheney engaging in "extravagant flirtations" with a friend of his. He doesn't elaborate.

Hmmmm. Salacious gossip, perhaps? Or perhaps the hint of a bombshell?

And every four years, as a presidential election looms, a more widespread warp of media perceptions occurs. It’s as if we each put on our own special pair of red plastic decoder glasses that enable us—force us, really—to read the news not as mere factual accounts of important events, but as potentially charged new electoral variables. For these next eleven months, in other words, I will become crypto-quasi-Jewish—that is, involuntarily asking as I scan each day’s headlines not Is it good for the Jews? but rather Is it bad for the Republicans?

I’m not talking about idle Schadenfreude, the fleeting, naughty satisfaction one takes, for instance, in Dick Cheney’s shotgun accident or his wife’s extravagant flirtations with a friend of mine over the years or even (forgive me, God) his atrial fibrillation last week. Rather, it’s a more instrumental, epistemologically problematic impulse to construe bona fide good news as bad and bad news as good. "The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Probably so, but it makes the brain hurt.

Page Six of The NY Post noticed the reference:

EVERYONE has to worry when Dick Cheney has a rifle in his hands - but Kurt Andersen should be extra careful after what he said about the veep's wife. In his latest New York magazine column, Andersen makes a curious reference to Lynne Cheney's "extravagant flirtations with a friend of mine over the years." But when we called the co-founder of Spy for more details, he clammed up. "That's as far as I'm going to go with it," Andersen said yesterday. "It didn't fall into the category of canoodling, but it was extraordinary, given that it was Lynne Cheney." Her office had no comment.

Canoodling?

The Urban Dictionary defines canoodling as:

snuggling, kissing, heavy petting, making out

So, something less than heavy petting? Hmmmmmm.

Perhaps she's just doing a little research for a new book. Her 1981 book 'Sisters' apparently wasn't good enough, or perhaps not steamy enough.

A publisher has canceled plans to reissue a racy novel by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, after she said the book did not represent her "best work."

New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), was going to reprint Sisters, a historical romance published in 1981 that includes brothels, attempted rapes and a lesbian love affair.