It's unfortunate that he has such low self-esteem and lack of confidence in himself.

How can such a seemingly nice guy be so unaffected by having been the legal enabler of what normal Americans would call torture?

He has no soul.

Excellent work, Jack. What a strange and wonderful story this is. I spent my early 20s in the Bay Area in the early 90s... This article brought me back to that place and time. Nice.

My "introduction" to the JT LeRoy story a month or two ago was through the outing of Savannah as the JT LeRoy surrogate. Having been guided into the full story through that aspect, I was surprised at how little attention the Savannah part received in this article.

Waldeman's story was also excellent.

Good stuff, Salon. Thanks.

What's wrong with you people?

Salon allowing the posting of comments against stories isn't an invitation to be cruel and demeaning. You realize that the woman who wrote this story is going to read what you said. Stop for a minute and think about how she might feel afterwards.

There's a guy named Cheney

Such a sinner

He smokes that rock and he's getting thinner

Cheney's cool but his mind is gone

One fat rock and it's going on

My two favorite moment:s

Both are from the segment where Clarence is asking joggers "What are you running from?"

Clarence asks a jogger "What are you running from?" then says, "YOU'RE RUNNING FROM THE TRUTH!"

After doing this several times a limping jogger passes and Clarence asks instead, "What are you hobbling from?"

I discovered early on with Wonder Showzen that the best segments are Beat Kids and Clarence. After that, I simply fast-forwarded through everything else in every episode just to see those two parts. (The one exception was the intoxicated bible cartoon). Everything I have read about Wonder Showzen cites Beat Kids and Clarence and little else. I would imagine that it is far easier for them to produce Clarence and Beat Kids than it is to produce custom animation. Perhaps a lean/rich adjustment is in order?

More Clarence and Beat Kids, less stuff to ff through.

Are all his appearances like this?

There appears to be at least one example of his plagiarism in the conservative magazine National Review. If true his actions cannot simply be dismissed as a college prank/mistake.

http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2006/3/23/181857/404/136#c136

I remember a certain Democrat Presidential candidate in 2004 who was relentlessly mocked for his "Frenchness," and here we've got the Cheney's swilling down Perrier. It should also be noted that when Cheney shot the old man in the face, he did so with a $2800 Italian shotgun.

He's only 24... Imagine how much he'll be able to steal once he's got a few more years working as a Republican operative under his belt!

Conservative pride.

I left the East Bay in the early 90s to return to Massachusetts at 24 after 6 years at Berkeley and working in the area afterwards. My reasons for leaving were complicated, however most of them involved family. It was very clear to me at the time, however, that the violence in the area was a factor - a big factor. Not that I feared being a victim of the violence myself - me, middle-class and white, living on Albany Hill. The East Bay felt like my "space" and being forced to regularly confront the sort of violence described in this article in my own space was frightening and depressing. Unsettling. In particular I had to ask myself if I wanted my children to grow up in this environment. The East Bay of the early 90s experienced the Bosn's Locker massacre, a random shooting in the middle of the day by teenagers of a family in Richmond who turned their van around in the wrong parking lot - and countless drug related homicides. Some college friends awoke one night to a loud bang only to discover an execution-style killing on their back porch. How can anyone endure confronting this on a near daily basis? It's difficult enough seeing a pimp shoot a hooker on San Pablo on your way to work in the morning. I can't imagine how difficult it must be when the pimp and hooker are you neighbors, your cousins, your schoolmates - your friends.

Moving back to rural coastal Massachusetts radically changed my "space" and in the ensuing years I think I fooled myself into believing that things had gotten better for the poor and disenfranchised in the East Bay and in ghettos everywhere. I was comfortable in that illusion.

It takes stories like this - along with a hard look at the poverty in New Orleans revealed by Katrina - to shatter this sort of illusion.

Do you think the fact that you were wearing leather pants and in a gay bar might have contributed to the misunderstanding?