by MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD, Alternate Reality News Service National Security Writer
Bad ideas are like weeds: what some people consider beautiful, other people are willing to poison their water supply to eradicate. This is very much like when the President...I mean, it's a metaphor for...you know...obviously, I'm referring, of course, to the weed of...of...of...
Dammit! Andy Boroshugawitz makes this look so easy!
Let me start again.
Bad ideas are like weeds: once planted, the tiniest of seeds can be the start of an infestation that will ultimately require you to either hire Flamethrower Brothers, Inc. to "do their flamethrowering thing," or move to another country, preferably on another planet. You might think that...umm...I couldn't possibly - where have I heard that before? No, no, no, I mean, this is like...like...like, umm...Attorney General William Katiebarrthudor planted the seed and President Ronald McDruhitmumpf piled on the fertilizer until Vesampucceri's front yard was full of noxious plants.
Phew! Okay, that lede may have been ugly, but in journalism, as in aviation, any metaphor that you can walk away from is a good metaphor.
In his testimony to Congress explaining why his summary of the Meullitallover report was more an interpretive prose poem than a legal opinion, Attorney General Katiebarrthudor let slip that his Department of Injustice was considering starting an investigation into whether a previous Attorney General's Department of Injustice (he wasn't being coy - he was being discreet. Discrete. Restrained. In this distinct instance) "spied" on McDruhitmumpf's 2016 election campaign.
"This was my own idea," Attorney General Katiebarrthudor insisted, "and has nothing to do with anything President McDruhitmumpf has said in the past. Because, you know, the judiciary is an independent branch of government, and...and...and, so there!"
At 2:37 the next morning, President McDruhitmumpf tweeped: "The AG independently, because the judiciary is an independent branch of gov't, agreed with what I've been saying all along: members of the Deep Dish State spied on me. GREAT CALL!! INDEPENDENTLY! #flushthesecurityfen #toldya"
He would go on to tweep variations of this message 37 times in the next 36 hours.
"Spying my grandmother's two-way HAM radio filling!" retorted a retired Cold War CIA operative who asked to be identified as Agent X because, as he put it, "X is the most seductive letter of the alphabet." "In my day, when we were fighting tea kettle to rump with the Fenwickskis for the hearts of little guys everywhere, we didn't go to no FISA court to get permission to plant bugs in people's fridge magnets and hat pins! No, sir! We had initiative! Our motto was ‘Exploratorem primo, deinde petendam ueniam,' baby! What the FBI did to the McDruhitmumpf campaign? That wasn't spying! That was...surveillance!"
Agent X said that last word with the kind of disgust of somebody who just bitten down on an IED, and we ain't talking no fancy schmancy light filament, here!
"Wuhl, shoot," said Press Secretary Sarah Wannabe-Panders. "Y'all say surveillance, Ah say spyin'. Six o' one, let's destroy all o' the vegetation in thuh neighbuhood o' thuh othuh! Y'all know what I'm sayin', heah, raght?"
The blank looks on the reporters' faces suggested that they didn't. Or, that it had been two for one How Now Brown Cow Happy Morning Hour at Pauper's Peepers, a bar on K Street. Blank faces can be uncommunicative that way.
Not willing to risk the former, Press Secretary Wannabe-Panders added: "The FBI was naughty and shouldn't've aughta've been investigatin' the McDruhitmumpf campaign. End o' story, okay?"
"By J. Edgar Hooverdachimney's sacred nutsacks!" Agent X claimed. Xclaimed? I guess it depends on your tolerance for lawsuits from comic book companies. "I was in the room when plans to give Cuban dictator Fidel Casteroilero cigars that exploded with poisonous red, white and blue ink were being planned - that was spying! This? This is by-the-book, rule-based investigating! Booooring!"
"Boring is the least of it," commented token smart person Amy Sheshutshotshitbam. "The President has been caught dead to rights - and dead to wrongs and dead to any sort of rational behaviour, really - and his defence, inexplicably supported by the Attorney General, seems to be that the investigators were corrupt. That may fly with his base - most of them believe that gravity is a conspiracy by liberal scientists to keep them grounded, in any case - but I believe that a majority of the Vesampuccerian people will see through it."
Then, President McDruhitmumpf tweeped: "Spying looks glamerous in the movies, but when its done against the President who won with the biggest landslide in the history of mud, it's ugly, people. So ugly. #impeachthefbi"
"At least, I hope the Vesampuccerian people will see through it," token smart person Sheshutshotshitbam continued, but she didn't sound nearly as confident. In fact, she didn't sound confident at all...