Not To Mention "Dubious"

by Duke Amboy

After the sheer lunacy of South Carolina, I was ready for some down time. I longed to head south to balmy Florida, hole up in my condo on South Beach for a day or two prior to the primary, slather myself in cocoa butter, and work on my tan while being fanned and fed grapes by my two secretaries - the "Itzi" girls: Fritzi and Mitzi, identical twins, Swiss National Gymnastics Olympic Team finalists, blonde, leggy, newly turned 18.

But whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make political correspondents...

There was the little matter called the State of the Union Address.

My editor at Blogsboro wasn't returning my calls (collect, natch...) because, so he says, he'd just got in some hot water over a public reading of my first Special Report. Well, all I can say is: Fuck 'em, if they can't take a joke...

Not that I'm kidding around here. Hardly. What I was doing: trying to figure a way to infiltrate the White House Press Corp and get within close enough proximity to the Capitol building to COVER THE STORY.

It's who I am, and all I've ever cared about...

But, alas, I didn't even make it through the first credential checkpoint.

True, I'd rolled into town at three a.m. the night before on a Greyhound, in the same set of clothes I've been wearing since Concord, clutching my duffel to my chest like the lifeline it so clearly is at this point, and - by the time it was my turn through the metal detector - I think my blood sugar must've dropped radically. I was a little twitchy, sharp spasms wracked my musculature, and I began to gibber a bit.

For some reason still inexplicable to myself, I asked the slab of beef holding the wand who had won the Super Bowl. He scowled at me - doubtless trying to decide specifically which drug (or combination thereof) I was on. At that point, I couldn't've told him. So, just for shits and giggles, he answered: "Miami."

"Miami?!?" I screeched. "Those fucking swine! My money was on DETROIT! Marino - that goddamn prima donna!"

"Sorry 'bout that, fella," he said, nonchalant, as he took me by the elbow and led me along hallways and down entry-card-operated elevators into a windowless room somewhere deep within the bowels of the Capitol complex...

There was a wooden table in there, a metal folding chair, a bucket in the corner, and a travel poster advertising sunny Havana (one's actual destination being, in point of fact, a bit more Easterly than that...).

"What's the bucket for?" I asked, keeping my voice as flat and neutral as possible.

"You'll find out, buckaroo," answered another side of Grade A sirloin, who was standing at one end of the table, drumming in 3/4 time on the glazed grain of its surface. "Be plenty o' time to answer all yer questions..."

I am hardly able to relate what happened next. Cavities were probed. Tests - polygraphic and otherwise - were administered. We had a long talk about a variety of high crimes and misdemeanors going back as far as the Johnson Administration. The upshot of it all - in the end they released me on my own recognizance and prohibited me from ever stepping foot within 1000 yards of the current (and any future) POTUS...

So I had to watch the SOTU speech in a bar - Oral Majority's - in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, with about fifty other so-called fringe journalists, who were convinced that 1) the election was already predetermined by the Freemasonic New World Order that controls our fates or 2) that the election will come down to a lesser of two or three evils sort of affair.

I was deep into my second bottle of Bushmill's before Shrub even took the podium, strutting through the House, high-fiving Reps and flashing the Dems an "I-told-you-fuckers-so" shiteater...

All I could make of his speech - through a filter of weariness and bone-deep despair - was that its first half seemed to consist of a colossal "You're on your own, fuckos!" to the average American. Sure, he wanted to "empower" somebody or other, and he babbled a lot of horseshit about "responsibility," but he still insisted on referring to Congress (and on their own turf too - the shameless fuck) as though they were a bunch of intractable infants who had just shat their collective pants...

Arrogance and dishonesty and self-aggrandizement (one can only hope) will never again hold so ruthless a sway at such a high level of political power.

But, casting a cursory glance back at the record of human history, I don't feel too convinced.

The best we can say is - we are merely 51 weeks away from the absolute end (unless he concocts another home field terrorist strike by one of his raghead minions and abolishes the electoral process entirely in the meantime...) of our collective gang-rape at the hands of the Current Administration. 

END OF DISPATCH