New Jersey would seem to be rather far away from where I live in Great Falls, Virginia, but if you look at a map, it becomes evident that Cape May is almost exactly the same latitude. The trick is taking US Route 50 East over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, then driving across the Delmarva Peninsula to Lewes, Delaware. It’s only about 130 miles, and takes about two hours, provided, of course, you don’t end up camping out in traffic on the western shore side of the Bay Bridge. At Lewes, there’s the admittedly impeding mouth of the Delaware River, at that point some ten miles across, but there’s also a ferry over to Cape May.
And that’s where Cerise and I were this afternoon – on that ferry, headed to the southernmost tip of New Jersey, intent on spending a romantic Memorial Day weekend in a cozy little bed-and-breakfast. It’s been unseasonably cool and a bit rainy along the entire Mid-Atlantic region for the last four or five weeks, but when the sun is out, as it was today, I can’t say I’ve seen better weather anywhere, and we took it all in, enjoying the fresh salt air and watching the puffy cotton-candy clouds scud across a cerulean sky. Then my Blackberry played “God Bless America.”
I hate it when people override my ring tone with something they think is clever, by the way. It does nothing to increase my estimation of them. But, on the other hand, I knew who it was – Schroeder, a middling dog in John Boehner’s pack of right-wing Weimaraners and Doberman Pinschers.
Schroeder pronounces his name Schr-OWE-der, which is wrong. It never ceases to amaze me how many Americans of German descent don’t even know how to pronounced their own names. Washington DC, for example, once had a football player named “Theismann,” who, until he won the Heisman trophy, thought he was named Joe “THEES-man.” Boehner, of course, has no choice but to pronounce his name correctly as “BAY-ner,” since the other alternative would be much too close to the truth for comfort. At least his parents, who obviously messed him up pretty badly otherwise, had the common sense not to name him Richard.
I waited for Schroeder to leave a message, which I ignored. Then, when he called again, I answered.
Tom: Hello, this is Tom Collins. What can I do for you and Representative Boehner?
Schroeder: Well, for starters, you could have stayed in Washington so we could have met in person today.
Tom: Well, number one, not only is today Saturday, it’s also the first day of a three-day holiday weekend. And number two, I booked my accommodations in Cape May and the tickets for the ferry I’m on at the moment several weeks ago. And number three, Gretchen, my private secretary, told me you called at five-thirty yesterday and she made an appointment for you to meet with me at seven o’clock Tuesday morning, because you insisted that your issues couldn’t wait until Tuesday afternoon.
Schroeder: Damn it all, Collins, this is [expletive] urgent!
Tom: Look, political failure on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine, okay?
Schroeder: All right, all right, I apologize for interrupting your vacation, but this really can’t wait, Tom! John’s breathing down my neck to produce some viable strategies to knock that godless [expletive] liberal [expletive] socialist [expletive] off her perch, pronto!
Tom: I take it, you mean House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?
Schroeder: Yeah, Botox Nancy! Who else?
Tom: Well, actually, the one-hundred and eleventh Congress has a lot of women who fit that description in it, you know.
Schroeder: Don’t remind me. John’s just sick about it, I tell you, sick! We all are! How could America turn out like this, I ask you, how?
Tom: Um, how about, you guys dragged the country into a war that looks like it’s going to last longer than Vietnam, then stood by and did nothing while a bunch of incompetents and crooks plundered and wrecked the economy so bad, we’ll be lucky not to see a repeat of the Great Depression?
Schroeder: That’s an over-simplification and you know it! There’s more than enough blame to go around!
Tom: There sure is – grab a fork and dig in. So what about Nancy Pelosi, anyway?
Schroeder: John figured we had her pinned! He was ready squash her like a bug! Then, just as the hammer was about to fall, she wriggled out of the way!
Tom: Excuse me, but do you know something about Nancy Pelosi that I don’t?
Schroeder: Huh?
Tom: Because the only thing I’ve heard about her lately is some asinine tempest in a teapot concerning whether the CIA lied to her about waterboarding back in, what, 2002, was it?
Schroeder: That was only seven years ago, you know!
Tom: Okay, sure, as I understand it, she made some remark last week or thereabouts saying that the CIA never told her about how the United States was using waterboarding on suspected terrorists.
Schroeder: Yeah, that’s it.
Tom: And then Leon Panetta, a Democrat, appointed by none other than Barack Obama, who’s been CIA Director for all of fourteen weeks, issued a statement saying that the CIA has never lied to Congress about anything.
Schroeder: And it hasn’t, either, at least not when the Republicans were running the government! It’s obvious! Without us to keep them on the reservation, Tom, the Democrats are going hog wild! They’re on the warpath, I tell you! Those [expletive] Hugo-Chavez-kissing, Castro’s-brother-hugging, Commie-coddling, North-Korea-bribing, gay-marrying, baby-killing, pot-smoking, coke-snorting, brie-eating, minority-tolerating, wine-drinking, Islamic-terrorist-sympathizing, illegal-immigrant-pandering, welfare-queen-subsidizing, evolution-believing, secular-humanist-supporting, big-government-loving, free-enterprise-hating, tax-and-spend Democrats are completely out of control, Tom!
Tom: Excuse me, but have you read my latest RNC white paper on updated platitudes, invectives, fallacies and buzzwords? Your party paid a very respectable sum for that, and, I might add, I put quite a bit of honest effort into it, too.
Schroeder: Yeah, I’ve seen it, but damn, Tom, I figure if a meaningless platitude, divisive invective, misleading generalization, illogical fallacy or transparent rhetorical device was good enough for Ronald Reagan, God rest his soul, or either of the Presidents Bush, for that matter, then it ought to be good enough for me! Tom, it’s very simple – the bottom line here is, the Democrats refuse to realize that torture saves American lives!
Tom: Listen, as far as I’m concerned, if the United States catches somebody who is actually making a bomb or biochemical weapon on their own, as opposed to being unwittingly dragged into an FBI sting operation; or if they’re wandering around a war zone with an AK-47 or an RPG shooting at American troops; or something else along those lines, for that matter, then the CIA, the Defense Department, the Civil Air Patrol or the frigging Boy Scouts can deprive them of food and water, stretch them on a rack, put burning wood splinters under their fingernails, beat their feet with lead pipes, hook their various appendages up to electrical wall sockets, drip hot wax on their bare skin, or even force them to listen to Hanna Montana for all I care. And frankly, I don’t contribute an aerial fornication whether the object of such activities is to obtain useful intelligence or just make them suffer for being such disgusting scum bags in the first place. What’s more, I bet most Americans feel pretty much the same as I do.
Schroeder: Yep, that sounds about right to me.
Tom: Except those Americans, like John McCain, for instance, who have been taken captive and tortured themselves, of course. For some reason, they generally don’t like the idea of us Americans torturing our captives, no matter what kind of information we might get or how much fun it might be.
Schroeder: Yeah, well, you’d think that folks like McCain, of all people, would be in favor of a little payback – but what the hell, go figure, I guess.
Tom: Presumably. So, as I’ve heard, now the Republicans are demanding an investigation into whether Nancy Pelosi was lying when she said that the CIA was lying when they briefed her about national security and didn’t mention waterboarding.
Schroeder: Correct! It’s totally inexcusable!
Tom: Maybe.
Schroeder: Maybe? I don’t understand.
Tom: Well, my point is, you have to take into account that Leon Panetta worked for Bill Clinton – first as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and then as the White House Chief of Staff.
Schroeder: Yeah; what of it?
Tom: So when Leon Panetta says the CIA is always honest with Congress, you have to realize the meaning of that statement depends on what your definition of “always” is, what your definition of “honest” is, what your definition of “Congress” is and, most importantly, on what your definition of “is” is.
Schroeder: Gee, I never thought of it like that.
Tom: I’m sure you didn’t. That’s what keeps me in business. Consequently, the upshot of the situation is this – neither the Republicans nor Pelosi can demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt, whether the CIA lied to her or she lied to the press about the CIA, unless the CIA releases the full transcripts of the briefings, right?
Schroeder: Right.
Tom: And what do we know about the chances of the CIA releasing those transcripts?
Schroeder: They’re about the same as Osama bin Laden getting invited to join the Burning Tree Country Club in Bethesda.
Tom: Exactly. And what are the implications of that statistic for the Republicans?
Schroeder: It means we can harp on the issue and imply that Pelosi is a liar forever!
Tom: Unfortunately, your analysis is pathetically eighties, my friend.
Schroeder: Pathetically eighties?
Tom: Sure, that strategy would have been fine in, say, 1985 or thereabouts, but trying it now will just make the Republicans look impotent, clueless, old fashioned, out of touch and desperate.
Schroeder: Why?
Tom: First of all because, right now, less than twenty percent of the public is even aware of this issue you guys are making such a big fuss about.
Schroeder: Yeah, but of those, the polls show that the majority think Pelosi is wrong.
Tom: Listen, my friend, this whole thing you and Representative Boehner are tearing your hair out about is strictly inside the Beltway – thanks to Republican supply-side economics, Republican foreign policy and Republican banking deregulation, people these days are so worried about survival, they don’t have thirty seconds to worry about whether the CIA or Congress is a bigger nest of liars, much less whether the Speaker of the House is better at it than the CIA Congressional Liaison Section. If you guys keep ranting about it, then the issue will eventually get enough exposure so that eighty or ninety percent of the public know what it’s about. Guess what happens then?
Schroeder: Nancy Pelosi goes down to defeat in her next bid for re-election, to be replaced by a true-blue Republican conservative?
Tom: Have you been hitting the absinthe again?
Schroeder: Uh, ah, well, I did have a couple for breakfast. But it’s legal now – so what?
Tom: Never mind. What happens then is the public realize that the Republican Party is morally, intellectually, conceptually and politically bankrupt.
Schroeder: They do?
Tom: Yeah, damn straight they do. It’s one thing to dupe prosperous, docile citizens with fear mongering, fatuous appeals to their greed and meaningless invocations of their prejudices, but quite another to try and pull that kind of stuff off on people who have been royally screwed and finally figured out who did it.
Schroeder: It is?
Tom: Yeah.
Schroeder: I didn’t know that.
Tom: I’m sure you didn’t. That’s what keeps me in business. Look, if the Republicans persist with this nonsense, you’re all going to get hoisted on your own petard.
Schroeder: Collins! I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head when speaking about the Republican Party! We never hoist our petards; why, we never even go near them – do you think we want to go blind or something?
Tom: I think the ferry is [inaudible] the Delaware River now…
Schroeder: What? You’re breaking up!
Tom: I think [inaudible] too far from the nearest [inaudible].
Schroeder: But if the Republican Party can’t make a huge national issue out of a seven year old national security briefing, and get the Democratic Speaker of the House to resign over it, what the hell can we do?
Tom: You should [inaudible] office on Tuesday [inaudible].
Schroeder: But what should I tell John Boehner?
Tom: Tell him to [inaudible] Memorial Day weekend; if his [inaudible] personality [inaudible] allows it, that is!
[Signal lost].