I get a lot of consulting business from politics, and, in fact, I get it from the entire philosophical spectrum. It turns out that everyone, from rock-ribbed conservatives to flaming liberal progressives, needs insightful advice and original ideas. Giving such advice does require a certain degree of circumspection, however. Take Joe Biden, for example – I conduct consultations with White House staff and also with representatives of the Biden presidential campaign, as well as the several political action committees and sundry additional entities that support Biden and other Democrats.
When dealing with them, I need to observe the legal firewalls set up among them to avoid conflicts of interest. Today, for example, I had a visit from Dr. Medea Diamelístike Absyrtus, a representative of Future Forward USA Action, the 501(c)(4) parent organization of the Future Forward USA Political Action Committee, or FF PAC, which, in turn, supports the presidential election of Joe Biden.
The FF PAC is what’s known as a Carey Committee – a hybrid political action committee that is not officially affiliated with a candidate and has the ability to operate both as a traditional PAC, contributing funds to a candidate’s committee, and also as a super PAC, which makes independent expenditures. To do that, FF PAC has to have separate bank accounts, one for each purpose, and those bank accounts even have to have a firewall between them. The presence of all these firewalls tends to turn the consulting landscape into a bit of a mine field, causing the likes of Yours Truly to occasionally walk on eggshells and engage in some rather circumspect language in order not to get into hot water. But it’s worth it – the money is awesome.
Medea rushed into my office Thursday morning in a complete tizzy. Call me a sexist if you want, but the poor woman was verging on hysterical.
“[Expletive]!” she exclaimed as she flung herself onto the couch in front of the picture window overlooking the White House and slammed her briefcase down on the coffee table. “Biden acting like a senile old fool was bad enough! His son backing out of that plea bargain we busted our [expletive] to get for him was bad enough! Hunter Biden shooting his mouth off on the Capitol steps, looking guilty as hell while proclaiming his father’s total innocence was bad enough! But was that [expletive] [expletive] all that could go wrong? Absolutely [expletive] not! Now Comer’s got the House to vote for an impeachment investigation! [Expletive]!”
“Well,” I responded, as mellifluously as possible, “it isn’t as if the least shred of evidence exists that President Biden was involved in any of his son’s… lapses of judgment.”
“Lapses of judgment?” she mocked. “Lapses of judgment? Pay-for-play offers to corrupt foreign officials! Who cares if Hunter was a lying sack of [expletive] when he claimed he could sell them his father’s influence? Once it comes out that’s what he did, what difference will it make that he never got his father to do anything? And Hunter’s totally Byzantine network of shell companies shuffling huge piles of money around! How is that going to play in prime time next October? And the tax evasion! Mountains of cocaine! Sex clubs and call girls written off as business expenses! Lapses of judgment my sweet Greek-American [expletive]! That lying, spoiled, selfish, stupid brat is going to be the reason we lose the presidential election to the Republicans!”
“While you’re blaming the current situation on Hunter Biden,” I suggested, “remember to thank the 2016 Democratic leadership for backing the only person who could possibly have lost an election to someone like Donald Trump.”
“Hillary Clinton, I’ll have you know,” she shot back, “was – and is – a fantastic Democratic fund raiser!”
“Hillary Clinton,” I opined, “was – and is – a loathsome, nattering crypto-lesbian feminazi blowhard whose political career consisted of copulating with her sexual predator husband a sufficient number of times to produce an offspring, then hanging around the White House failing miserably at every assignment he gave her, then parlaying that into a job as a do-nothing carpetbagger US senator and subsequently being appointed the worst Secretary of State since Henry Stimson before finally bullying, threatening and intimidating her way into becoming your party’s presidential nominee in an election that should have been such a cakewalk for the Democrats, even her Republican rival was astounded when he won.”
“Yeah, okay,” Medea continued with a glib shrug, “but she’s still an incredible Democratic fund raiser, and right now, we need all the money we can get.”
“Due,” I pointed out, “to lapses of judgment on the part of Democratic leadership that make Hunter Biden look like a paragon of perspicacity. Unless you folks stop blaming your mistakes on the Republicans and start doing what’s necessary to avoid making more, you’re never going to stop Trump from turning this country into a fascist dictatorship.”
At that, she heaved a huge sigh and rolled her eyes. “Yatta-yatta-yatta! You’re not helping!”
“That,” I frankly told her, “is because you’re not listening. You guys want to beat Trump in November, you had better get your left-wing radicals to keep a lid on all that noise of theirs until the election is over – there will be plenty of time to address their PC, tree-hugging, woke and social-progressive issues in Biden’s second term. Whereas, if they keep yelling about them loud enough for the voters in Peoria to hear and Trump wins, chances are there will never be another legitimate presidential election in the United States ever again. And get somebody to lock Kamala Harris in the basement at Number One Observatory Circle until November 6.”
Medea sat bolt upright and glared at me. “Why?”
“Because,” I elaborated, “the upcoming presidential race of this nation populated by three hundred and thirty million people is going to be decided by two hundred and fifty thousand undecided voters from twelve states living in the last twenty-nine congressional districts that haven’t been completely gerrymandered into electoral irrelevance, and the best way to get them to vote for Donald Trump is to make them all start thinking about President Kamala Harris being sworn in after Joe Biden drops dead before his eighty-third birthday, that’s why.”
“All right,” she muttered. “Point taken. But doing that isn’t going to fix anything about this bogus impeachment [expletive].”
“What steps,” I inquired, “have you been considering?”
Medea shrugged and looked sardonically up at the ceiling, ticking off the options on her fingers. “More advertising attacking Trump, more advertising praising Biden’s accomplishments, ads aimed at improving Biden’s public image, ads criticizing the Republicans representing districts that went for Biden in 2020 who voted for the impeachment inquiry, ads aimed at changing the minds of the eighteen percent of Democrats who favor the impeachment inquiry, ads attacking the impeachment inquiry as a fishing expedition, ads attacking Jim Comer and Jason Smith as politically motivated hacks, ads attacking high-profile members of the Freedom Caucus for demanding the inquiry, ads presenting rolling refutations of so-called ‘findings’ released by the inquiry, ads linking Trump to the inquiry that portray the ringleaders as his puppets, and… oh Jesus [expletive] Christ on a bike!” She lowered her gaze to meet mine. “I have a complete list in my briefcase if you’d like to read it.”
“No need for that,” I replied. “I assume you’ve explored the inquiry’s potential for fund raising?”
“It was the first thing that occurred to me,” she confirmed, “and just about everybody else. As a matter of fact, Kamala Harris scored big with a fund raising appeal based on the impeachment inquiry the same day. So – considering what you just said about her, how about that?”
“As long as she’s just sending emails to Democratic party faithful who approve of her,” I mused, “it’s not anything we should be concerned with, is it?”
“Ah, no, of course not,” she confirmed with a sly smile.
“But if a little bird were to alight upon her windowsill and advise her to stay out of the media for the next twelve months,” I remarked, “well, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat, isn’t it?”
“You might think so,” she cautiously offered.
“And speaking of raising money with this,” I continued, “have you considered going full Trump with it?”
“Meaning what?” she demanded, eyes narrowing.
“Meaning,” I explained, “proclaiming Biden’s victimhood, playing for sympathy, decrying the mindless, politically motivated persecution behind it all – that sort of thing.”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it,” she pondered aloud, “would such an approach attract more of the Democratic base than it alienates? And furthermore, it’s kind of… tawdry, isn’t it?”
“It appears,” I speculated, “that you might have been inside the Beltway a bit too long. Look at how well that stuff works for Trump – and not just the impeachments, even the prosecutions, too. Ninety-one felony counts and the money keeps pouring in. Seems to me that the people who give politicians money, at least, love tawdry pleas of victimhood.”
“We can’t just go aping Trump,” she objected. “That would be totally [expletive] up. People would notice.”
“Nobody said anything about emulating Trump’s whiny bleats and squawks,” I clarified. “Biden’s challenges to his unjust persecutions should have a very classy tone to them, something that befits that concerned, soft-spoken-grandpa shtick of his.”
“It’s not a ‘shtick!’” Medea insisted. “He’s sincere!”
“Really, Doctor?” I smirked. “He’s got you fooled, too?”
“Not everybody’s a complete cynic in this town, Mr. Collins,” she fumed dismissively. “And whatever you say about him, Joe Biden is a way better leader than Donald Trump ever was.”
“And he smells way better than a honey wagon in July, too,” I responded. “But as we have seen, about a third of the American electorate prefers jumping on the Trump honey wagon, and thanks to redistricting and the Electoral College, that means the rest of us have to hold our noses and figure out what to do about him. And if casting Joe Biden as the victim in this impeachment inquiry imbroglio has the potential to give your side significant leverage, I urge you to consider it, however distasteful it might seem.”
“Such as what?” she prompted acridly.
“Well,” I proposed, “we know Joe has this popular image as a sort of quiet old gentleman, so why not… just as a completely hypothetical example of what his campaign could do… play up the angle of a bunch of bullies trying to mug an octogenarian? In other words, take advantage of the fact that he’s old, instead of apologizing for it and rationalizing about it all the time. And portray Biden in that narrative as a surprisingly tough old bird who lays them out on the pavement when they try to jump him. He’s Irish, right? They’re tough and they like to fight – Biden is the perfect character for a mildly comic fund raiser commercial based on his persecution by the impeachment inquiry thugs.”
“Hmmm…” she murmured. “That might work, actually, for his campaign, that is. Let’s… ah… hope they think of something like that.”
“Sure it would,” I concurred. “And I would not be terribly surprised if they do. See? When you conceptualize this situation the right way, the ad copy almost writes itself. Now, have you given any thought to some traditional tooth-and-nail stuff?”
“Tooth and nail stuff?” She glanced at me quizzically. “You know, I’ve heard the phrase all my life, but all that ever came to mind when I heard it was orthodontics and Vietnamese ladies with emory boards. What the hell does it mean, anyway?”
“Back in the days when places like Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky were the American frontier,” I related, “there was a form of fisticuffs practiced among the Appalachian pioneers which allowed not only biting off ears, but also the use of one’s fingernails to gouge out the eyes of one’s opponent. That’s tooth-and-nail fighting.”
Medea reflexively placed her hand on her stomach as her face lost all its color and assumed a grimace of profound distress. “Oh, my God. That’s just a story, right? Some kind of folklore tall tale like Paul Bunyan?”
“No,” I informed her, “it’s historical fact. It was real, and, in fact, rather popular in some locales. There are court records of circuit judges complaining that in certain counties they could not impanel a jury where no man was missing an eye, or an ear, or without the scars of a bite mark on his face.”
Medea turned slightly green. “That’s… totally disgusting,” was all she could manage. A long pause ensued as she breathed deeply and said nothing. “All right,” she whispered at last. “Where were we? Right. Thanks for explaining that. Now, again, uh… why did you bring it up?”
“Madame,” I told her, “since the days of Barry Goldwater…”
“Who?” she interrupted.
“Never mind,” I persisted. “Since the nineteen-sixties, fascists in the Republican Party have been, metaphorically speaking, biting the ears off and gouging the eyes out of liberal Democrats, often, in the beginning, with the help of so-called Dixie-crats, who were Democrats from places like Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee, people who are now, thanks to Nixon’s Southern Strategy, fascist Republicans just like the founders of the John Birch Society…”
“The what?” she interrupted again.
“Never mind, Doctor,” I admonished as I pressed on. “But the liberal Democrats, being a high minded, idealistic sort, would never stoop to tooth-and-nail politics, no matter how much ground they lost. So it eventually got to the point we have arrived at now, where the majority of the people are Democrats, mostly moderates and liberals, who are still high minded and idealistic and, consequently, have lost several presidential elections where the Democratic candidate received the majority of votes. And in 2024, they stand a pretty good chance of losing what will be, if they lose it, the last genuine, constitutional election in the history of the United States.”
“So,” she concluded, “you’re saying, whatever we Democrats do, it’s got to be this tooth-and-nail stuff the Republicans have been doing to us for the last sixty years?”
“Correct,” I vouched.
“Are you talking about… extra-legal actions?” she queried in an uncertain voice.
“No, no, nothing like that,” I assured her. “Just think for a minute about how tech giants like Microsoft and Facebook pulled all kinds of dirty tricks that weren’t illegal, simply because the law takes years, if not decades, to catch up with technology. So, I recommend you start spending some of that FF PAC money on prompt engineers who can train AI on how pinpoint those two hundred and fifty thousand voters the Democrats need to win this time and put some more money on influencers who can reach them through their social media accounts and some more money on bots that can carefully spam them with cleverly constructed, cajoling emails and some more money on Web crawlers to track what the Republicans are doing with them, and more money on AI algorithms to analyze the Republican’s strategies and thwart them, and more money on trolls to neutralize Republican operatives in chat rooms, and so forth.
“And so forth?” she asked, her eyebrows raised in anticipation.
“And… so,” I revealed, “in anticipation of this consultation, I have prepared a comprehensive cyberstrategy plan to manage the key voters in the next election, including reaction to the Biden impeachment inquiry and, if necessary, a subsequent impeachment, complete with opposition action tracking, adversary countermeasures and black swan incident risk analysis and remediation. But it would take much longer than the time allocated for this consultation to explain it in detail.”
“Don’t bother then,” she curtly stated, snapping her briefcase shut, picking it up and standing, ready to leave. “When can you send it to me?”
“COB today,” I told her.
“Good. Do it.” She made for the door, stopping just as her hand touched the knob to look back at me. “Will there be plenty of tooth and nail stuff in there?”
“You bet,” I promised. “Now don’t you Democrats be too squeamish to use it.”