It hurts me deeply to sully the name of (the late great) John Lee Hooker by associating his signature refrain with the likes of Dick Cheney, but I prostitute myself for the sake of a catchy headline.

If Uncle Sam only had a dollar for every time an American heard or read that Dicky heard a boom in Bagram, that would go a long way towards balancing this year’s federal budget.

For some reason that’s the most important detail of the story that Dick Cheney was the possible target of a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives just outside the gates of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. That Cheney heard a boom. A loud boom. Every print story mentions that prominently. And all the news networks were making that their attention grabbing detail. A Google search pulled up an impressively long list of links. The first few are here, here, here, here and here. If you click on all, please send an extra $5 as a voluntary tax payment to the IRS this year.

This obsessive focus on one obscure detail of a major news story is virtually unprecedented. It hasn’t happened at least since the astronaut lady made that mad dash to Florida wearing an adult diaper.

In that case, it was actually a little understandable. It was a quirky detail. And a surefire magnet for that miniscule fraction of the population that is into pee and poo jokes.

But “Cheney hears a boom”? It sure as heck doesn’t have the timeless appeal of “Horton hears a hoo” and even if I scratched my head for the rest of Cheney’s natural life, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it’s a significant news detail.

When bombs go off, isn’t it somewhat inevitable that everyone in the vicinity will hear a loud boom? We are supposed to be somehow impressed with Cheney’s ability to hear loud booms? If so, how? Or, as the man said, how-how-how-how? I don’t recall, did he ever say why-why-why-why?

I can only conclude that the “loud boom” thing is meant to distract us from some other detail the vice’s entourage doesn’t want leaking out. (Apparently, if you’re in Cheney’s inner circle, you refer to him as the vice. Even if I’m not in that hallowed inner circle, I still want to demonstrate my complete lack of personal animus. Any animus you may find in any post is purely professional.)

That may be a big hint right there, leak. I can’t speak from personal experience. But just as it is inevitable that people in the vicinity of a bombing will hear a loud boom, I’m led to believe that a non-trivial proportion of the people in the vicinity will later be able to attest from personal experience that bombings can be accompanied by something leaking down your leg.

(Anybody who saw a pee or poo joke coming a long way off can take a bow here.)

Maybe big bad brave Cheney (“did Dicky-wicky hear a loud boom then, poor baby?”) suffered an embarrassing leak, and this loud boom stuff is the result of some men showing up in black suits and expensive sunglasses to pass a selective memory recoding device in front of the eyes of everyone present.

Or maybe nobody needed to even show up. Just as Cheney carries around medical attendants in his hip pocket wherever he goes, maybe he also carries around an entourage member whose full-time job is to apply a selective memory recoding device to Cheney at regular intervals. That would certainly explain a lot.