No Experience Necessary. Must Be Satellite-Visible, Relatively Combustible. Generic Foreign-ness A Plus.
It's late October, it's election year and things aren't looking good for for the party in power. We've been here before. We know what to expect. This time of the year has some very specific associations. You know what I'm talking about: goat urine and salmonella.

No no, wait. That's just associations I make with this time of year because I am required by law to take my kids to a ridiculously overpriced pumpkin patch every single year. The centerpiece is the petting zoo, complete with bunnies and a pony and incontinent goats (hence the wafting uriney tang) and not-at-all-well-looking fowl of various stripes. Seriously, the ducks and chickens have stripes. They're black and painted on and they used to say QUARANTINE. If a chicken isn't even good for McNuggeting, you know something is horribly wrong with it.

No, seriously, as it's an election year, I can say for certain what we should expect: the imminent death of al Qaeda's #3 man.

We get them a lot, the #3 guy. You may not know his name yet, but you know him. He's the one who will be introduced in very short order along with some very glower-y pictures in one of those Arab head-dresses and a patchy beard and a name with all kinds of randomly strung jaggly letters in it. Very threatening, all those consonants.

And then, just when the 24 hour news networks have convinced us that this latest al Qaeda #3 man is living in every single one of our homes, in the crawl-spaces and basements or even just in the dusty corners where the light don't quite reach all the way at night. He sits there, waiting for the signal, audible only to himself with his crazy terrorist dog-like hearing. Waiting, just waiting, with a Jeopardy!-like trigger-buzzer in one hand (attached to the non-nuclear "dirty bomb" strapped to his back) and a whole Costco-size family value portion of KY jelly in the other, forcing us to decide to pray for which one we'd prefer him to use first.

And then, lo! The al Qaeda #3 will suddenly be squished by a giant US non-nuclear weapon at the last possible second, smoked out of his hole and annihilated with the help of an heretofore anonymous US patriot agent/soldier who looks remarkably like Kiefer Sutherland. We'll all be relieved, but deep down we'll know that the terrorist guy was only doing his job because it is the job of the al Qaeda #3 man to be killed by the United States on a regular basis when it suits our needs.

Sources deep within my gut tell me that the Bush administration is busy concocting the phoney-baloney backstory for the latest al Qaeda #3 as we speak. But it can't be just any random Arab anymore, no. The stakes are too high. We're talking about potential loss of the House of Representatives or even the Senate here. National security issues if there ever were any. There won't be enough of an approval rating bounce from a announcing we've killed yet another from the stock list of Scary Semites.

This time the enemy will be revealed at the last moment. And it will be someone we know. There is a short list of candidates.

1) All Democrats. Not as likely a choice because it's already self-evident that terrorists and Democrats have the same goal: less Republicans in power. So the electorate will see it coming. Plus it would take FOREVER to get all the Democrats in the #3 slot one by one and take them out.

2) State Department official Alberto Fernandez, a Bush guy who says we've acted with "arrogance" and "stupidity" in Iraq. TRAITOR! Plus, his name kind of sounds like Alberto Gonzalez, the Attorney General, whom is generally despised by both Democrats (for being a pro-torture anti-Constitution lap-dog) and Republicans (for being Mexican). With the right amount of confusion on the Monday before election day, this one could really have some legs. You know, once we find them after the smoke clears.

Two decent options, but I really think it's going to be:

3) Former president of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. He's already come out and pissed his boy off by butting in to this whole election business. And what would make a better news story than the son betrayed by the father he... well, not "loved" since they're WASPs, but whatever it is that WASP sons do to show non-hostility toward their fathers. Accept money from them and allow them to use their names to get into Ivy League schools. Whatever. The point is, it has great potential as a storyline. If only we could get one of W's uncles to start sleeping with his mom, we'd have a modern day Hamlet in the making. Maureen Dowd would plotz. You know, to the extent Irish-Catholic girls can do that.

It sounds far-fetched, but I'm starting to wonder. Bush 41 lives in Houston. When Bush 43 whipped up that hurricane to destroy New Orleans, where did all the refugees go? And then allegedly sparked a giant crime spree?

Clever, W. Clever. But a bit indirect. If I were Bush 41, I'd be cozying up the mile-deep bunker all presidents are given as a retirement gift once leaving office. Out go the storage items--ping pong table, Jeb's school awards, jars of grandma's old preserves and Bar's old penis, Brent Scowcroft--and move in some old Navy hammocks and a modern compturized command-and-control center. Once they come for al Qaeda's #3, they always get their man. Usually retroactively.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 3.0


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:15 PM