Around seven on Friday evening, just as I was about to congratulate myself on a very long and profitable day which had begun shortly before six in the morning, I received a telephone call from Austin Houston Crockett Bowie Bonham III, Texan extraordinaire.
Tom: Hello, this is Tom Collins.
Austin: Tom? That you?
Tom: Yes.
Austin: Tom, this is Austin Bonham.
Tom: I know – I’d recognize that voice anywhere.
Austin: You would, huh?
Tom: Absolutely. It’s unmistakable.
Austin: Meaning what?
Tom: Meaning you sound like a cross between Strom Thurmond, Lyndon Johnson, Foghorn Leghorn and Yosemite Sam.
Austin: Well, I suppose I’ll take that as a compliment.
Tom: You should – since nobody knows what Jubilation T. Cornpone sounded like, all I can do is imagine he sounded like you. So what’s up?
Austin: Damn it all, Tom, that there Michael McCrum that special prosecutor, he’s gone and got a grand jury to indict the governor of Texas on two felony counts!
Tom: So I heard earlier today. Rick Perry is the first Texas governor to be indicted for a felony in over one hundred years, and if convicted, he could be sentenced to ninety-nine years on the first felony count alone, and up to ten years on the second.
Austin: All over this here Democrat DA they got over in Travis County. The cops caught her drunk driving back in April, 2013, and Lordy, did she ever kick up a fuss at the police station! You ought to see that there tape they made of her, cussing and fussing and threatening the police officers. They had to put her in handcuffs and then hog-tie her to a chair! She’s a pretty ugly woman to begin with, Tom, but I tell you…
Tom: How ugly is she?
Austin: She’s so ugly, even Ripley won’t believe it.
Tom: No, really, how ugly?
Austin: She’s so ugly, she don’t need no mask for Halloween.
Tom: Come on, now, how ugly?
Austin: She’s so ugly, she can make a blind man sick to his stomach.
Tom: Wow, now that’s ugly.
Austin: You bet, but on top of her natural ugliness, there she is in that video, handcuffed and tied to a chair, making faces at the police! Here’s this big, fat, ugly Democrat district attorney – and she’s the head of some fancy Democrat-inspired Public Integrity Unit, no less – yelling and screaming and sticking her tongue out at the camera, acting sidewinder drunk and telling everybody she only had two glasses of wine. I don’t suppose that open bottle of vodka the cops found in her car had anything missing from it, now did it? Oh, no, of course not – big fat ugly feminist Democrat district attorneys never lie, now do they?
Tom: Seems to me I remember she plead guilty to drunk driving, though, didn’t she?
Austin: Yeah, and she did forty-five days in jail for it, too, not to mention paying a four-thousand dollar fine and having her driver’s license suspended for six months.
Tom: Actually, you know, although I’m not a lawyer and I’m certainly not an expert on jurisprudence in Texas, that sounds like a pretty harsh sentence. I mean, here in Washington DC, on a first offense, they…
Austin: Oh, yeah, it was a record-breaker for a first offense, that sentence, even for Texas, no doubt about it. My cousin, he got drunk as a purple-butt ‘possum and drove his pickup truck straight through the front window of the Piggly-Wiggly and he only got a three month driver’s license suspension, a thousand dollar fine, fourteen weeks mandatory AA meetings and two hundred hours community service, working on fixing up that there Piggly-Wiggly he done drove into. And that was his um… third offense, I think. But then my cousin ain’t no God-damn Democrat do-gooder district attorney who runs some Public Integrity Unit investigating stuff nobody but God-damn Democrats are interested in anyway. And she is. And that’s the real nut-buster, right there, Tom – I can’t say “was,” because that big fat ugly old Democrat battle-ax is still the district attorney of Travis County and she’s still heading up that there Public Integrity Unit, going around digging up dirt on Republicans who ain’t doing nothing but working hard to make Texas a better place to live!
Tom: Seems to me, I do remember her claiming that the DWI arrest was politically motivated and aimed at terminating her career. You don’t suppose there might be any truth to that allegation, do you?
Austin: Hell, no, we caught her driving drunk, and we did it fair and square! But that big, fat, ugly old Democrat dyke…
Tom: She’s gay?
Austin: Yeah, Rosemary Lehmberg is a big, fat, ugly old lesbian Democrat drunk, that’s the long and the short of it, Tom, and that drunk part included being guilty of drunk driving, and I say, when a big fat ugly old lesbian Democrat district attorney pleads guilty to drunk driving, she ought to resign. What do you think?
Tom: I think big, fat, ugly old lesbian Democrat district attorneys who lead Public Integrity Units should be extremely careful that they don’t get arrested for drunk driving in Texas, because the typical, average Texan – as opposed to the ones who live in Travis County where the University of Texas cultivates what any ordinary Texan would characterize as a community of namby-pamby, counterculture bleeding heart socialist liberals – wants tall, lithe, pretty young straight Republican district attorneys with nice hairdos, rich handsome husbands and two-point-three bright, lovely, well-behaved children who are a credit to the Lone Star State. But on the other hand, you must admit, Lehmberg’s alternative theory – that she was stopped without probable cause, and set up for the arrest because of her perceived politics – does seem to have a certain degree of credibility.
Austin: No, now, that’s not how the game is played, Tom. If you’re a district attorney, someone who prosecutes DWIs, and you get arrested for DWI and plead guilty, you have to resign. Especially if you run a Public Integrity Unit! Under those circumstances, Tom, you can’t just keep on being the district attorney!
Tom: Why not?
Austin: Because it don’t make a lick of sense, that’s why!
Tom: Well, if Rosemary Lehmberg – her status as a big, fat, ugly, liberal Democrat lesbian Texan notwithstanding – honestly believes her DWI bust was a politically motivated act aimed at driving her from public office, then she is more or less duty bound, ethically required and morally mandated to stand her ground and refuse to resign.
Austin: Yeah? Well how about that there al-Maliki guy, the Prime Minister of Iraq? Didn’t he say that the law and constitution and the Prophet Mohammed knows what-all else justified him staying in office? And didn’t he resign anyhow?
Tom: That’s different. Nouri al-Maliki is a big, fat, ugly, lying, thieving, Shi’ite hypocrite whose army messed their pants and ran away from a bunch of rag-tag Sunni morons, leaving said morons with about a billion dollars worth of the finest ground-based armaments the United States of America could provide. Such a display of incompetence does not merely imply resignation, it clearly demands it. And as far as I know, by contrast, the big, fat, ugly, liberal Democrat lesbian we are discussing is an outstanding district attorney.
Austin: Well, the governor of Texas disagreed.
Tom: So I’ve heard. And his expression of that disagreement took the form of vetoing the funds for the big, fat, ugly, liberal Democrat lesbian district attorney’s Public Integrity Unit.
Austin: Yeah, well, that’s right, pretty much.
Tom: And subsequently, that very act formed the principal pillar of Special Prosecutor Michael McCrum’s indictment presented to the grand jury.
Austin: Um, yeah, it did.
Tom: Conservative Republican Governor Rick Perry told this big, fat, ugly, liberal Democrat lesbian district attorney, in no uncertain terms, that if she did not resign, he would cut off the money which funds and operates her Public Integrity Unit, didn’t he?
Austin: Well, now, Tom, when you put it like that… hell, I mean, of course it sounds like Rick was playing politics with the taxpayers’ money and trying to illegally influence the actions of another public official and stuff like that there, but damn it, all Rick Perry was trying to do was get that big, fat, ugly, liberal, lesbian, drunk Democrat district attorney out of the court house and send her back to wherever it is in Texas that big, fat, ugly, liberal, drunk Democrat lesbians lawyers go! Hell, Tom, it just ain’t right, some bunch of egg-headed intellectual college professors in some ivory-tower college town, talking I don’t know what-all kind of silly crap about this and that communist French philosopher or socialist lab-rat who makes his living off the global warming hoax or some book written by some Sodomite who wants to teach evolution to our children, getting together to drink their snotty organic wine and eating their snotty gluten-free vegetarian canapes and campaigning for some big, fat, ugly, liberal lesbian drunk Democrat to be their district attorney and end up running a state-wide Public Integrity Unit to go around turning over flat rocks to see what’s under them all over Texas, and then that big, fat, ugly, liberal, drunk Democrat gets caught red-handed doing a DWI, pleads guilty to it and refuses to resign being a big, fat, ugly, liberal lesbian Democrat district attorney! I’ll tell you what that is, Tom – it’s down-right un-American, that’s what that is!
Tom: So, okay, maybe that burns your onion, Austin, my friend, and maybe it burns Governor Rick Perry’s onion too, but that hardly justifies breaking the law.
Austin: Sometimes breaking the law is the only way to get justice done!
Tom: No end, no matter how nobly conceived, can ever constitute justice when achieved by illegal means.
Austin: Oh, Christ, who said that – William O. Douglas? Ruth Ginsberg? Thurgood Marshall? Louis Brandeis? Oliver Wendell Holmes?
Tom: No, actually, I said that.
Austin: And it proves that you sure as hell ain’t no Texan. Look, Tom, old Rick’s done and gone and stepped in some mighty deep and wet bull muffins here, and what I need from you is a strategy on how he can clean it off his boots and get back on track to the White House.
Tom: For my usual rates?
Austin: Sure, sure, just send me a bill. I always pay them, don’t I?
Tom: That you do. Okay, then, first of all, we have to assume he’s not going to get convicted.
Austin: We do?
Tom: I’m afraid so. Let’s face it, if Rick Perry has to run for President of the United States from a prison cell, although I’m sure he will get a lot more votes than Lyndon LaRouche did when he tried it, Rick’s wife is still not going to be selecting new curtains for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue afterward.
Austin: Um… ah… huh, yeah, I guess not.
Tom: So, provided that he doesn’t get convicted, Rick can, in fact, turn some of those things you told me around and use them to get votes. For example, you mentioned that his motivation was to get someone who anybody would agree does not represent the majority of Texans’ views on major social and economic issues out of office because that person had demonstrated significant moral turpitude.
Austin: Right – by getting arrested and pleading guilty to DWI.
Tom: It would be better not to mention the DWI.
Austin: Really? How come?
Tom: Because too many Republican voters have DWIs on their own records. You see, that’s what I’m trying to convey here – even if he manages to avoid conviction on these charges, Rick’s going to have to use quite a bit of finesse in their wake. When questioned about the case, for example, he should never point out directly that the big, fat, ugly, drunken Democrat lesbian district attorney was big, fat, ugly, lesbian, drunk or Democrat. He should only note that the district attorney pleaded guilty to a crime “unbefitting the trust of such an office…”
Austin: Oh, oh, I like that one! Hold on while I write that down.
Tom: Sure, go ahead. You know, Austin, to tell the truth, it’s been rather a long day. Basically, I’d say Rick needs to very selectively recognize certain aspects of the incident; provide carefully constructed explanations containing code words appropriate to his target base; offer similarly crafted excuses that essentially blame the Democrats not only for what Rick did, but also for everything else that occurred; and issue sincere sounding pronouncements emphasizing the theme that, while what is past may be interesting and instructive, what is in America’s future is so much more important and worthy of our attention.
Austin: Whoa, Nelly, Tom, I figure you pretty much covered the Galveston waterfront there! Yeah, I know it’s late, good buddy. How about you email me them goodies by close of business on Monday?
Tom: Sure, no problem. If Rick can get out of this still wearing a black outfit instead of an orange one, I’ll make sure he’s got talking points galore that exculpate him with respect to the situation while excoriating the opposition for even bringing it up in the first place.
Austin: Outstanding! That’s why I pay you the big bucks, you cynical Beltway bandit! Go for it!
Tom: I shall. Now – cocktail hour at the Round Robin is calling, and I do have dinner reservations for nine at the Capital Grille.
Austin: Steaks! Now that’s more like it! Looks like you got some Texan in you after all, hombre!
Tom: A bit, perhaps. Ciao!
Austin: Huh? Oh, yeah, okay, ‘bye!