As the nation recovered from the worst example of motion picture criticism ever in Colorado on Friday morning, it was another working Saturday for Gretchen and myself. Around two in the afternoon, I held a consultation with Roy Cone, an aide to Representative Michele Bachmann.
“What can I do for the congresswoman today?” I asked as Cone reclined primly on the couch, his briefcase lying flat, squarely adjusted in the exact center of the coffee table positioned in front of it.
“To begin with,” Cone huffed, “we had no idea that John McCain is Muslim terrorist sympathizer.”
“Golly,” I responded, “how do you figure you missed something like that?”
“Beats me,” Cone shrugged as he smugly opened his briefcase and withdrew a sheaf of papers, holding it up for me to see with an air of exaggerated significance. “Because I have here the names of twenty-seven Democrat members of the House, eleven Democrat members of the Senate, sixty-three members of the White House staff, seventy-one FBI agents, eighty-two uniformed and civilian employees at the Pentagon, one hundred and sixteen CIA operatives, agents and analysts; one hundred and thirty-eight employees at the NSA, one hundred and seventy-nine employees at DHHS, and… two hundred and five people at the State Department who are Islamic terrorist agents!”
“May I see that list?” I requested.
“Of course not!” Cone snapped as he dropped the papers back into this briefcase.
“Why not?” I probed.
“Because, obviously,” he staunchly maintained, “if we start telling everyone who the covert Muslim infiltrators are, all kinds of negative things will happen.”
“Such as?” I gently pressed.
“Well, for starters,” Cone explained, “what’s now the sole, proprietary data of Michele Bachmann and her loyal associates would suddenly become available to anyone. If that happens, then this vital, important information, obtained at extreme cost to the Michele Bachmann organization, will decrease so dramatically in value it would completely vitiate our expected return on the commensurate considerable investment of our precious and scarce resources.”
“So,” I concluded, “you’re saying that knowledge is power and to share this particular knowledge with your political or philosophical adversaries would cause your own power to decrease unacceptably?”
“You could put it that way,” Cone allowed. “We paid a wheelbarrow of money and spent a boatload of labor hours to get the real skinny on the Muslim terrorists lurking all over our government – plotting, planning and conspiring to bring down the American Way of Life and institute an Islamic republic under strict Sharia law. Why should we give it away for nothing? Let the liberal Lame Stream Media, with their billions of dollars and thousands of deluded dupes working for them figure it out on their own damn dime, that’s what we say!”
“Okay,” I persisted, “and what else?”
“If we were to release the names of these hidden Islamic terrorist sympathizers in our government,” Cone argued, “then first of all, they would be alerted to the fact that they had been discovered. Doing so would allow them to cover their tracks, to destroy crucial evidence, or to flee American justice, and thereby make it difficult, if not impossible, to effectively pursue investigations and prosecutions against them. Secondly, it would endanger the many loyal, patriotic Americans who risked their lives by giving the Bachmann organization this vital information. Once an infiltrator’s name becomes public, their immediate impulse will be to find those who betrayed them, tie them up in front of an Islamic banner backdrop, fire up a camera, make a fundamentalist Muslim propaganda statement, then slowly cut their victims’ heads off with hack saws in the most inept manner possible and post the videos on YouTube!”
“Very well,” I conceded, “with airtight, highly reasoned and factually based arguments like that, it looks like there’s no way anybody but Michele Bachmann and her loyal band of patriots is ever going to know the identities of this alleged huge gang of fundamentalist Islamic terror conspirators infecting our government.”
“Well,” Cone mused, “certainly not now. Maybe after the election, when Romney is President, it will be safe to reveal this list to a secret session of a hand-picked Congressional committee, chaired by Michele Bachmann. I mean, really, Tom, can you blame us? Look what happened when we revealed the name of just one of the conspirators!”
“You’re referring,” I presumed, “to Huma Abedin?”
“Exactly,” Cone confirmed. “We take one name off this list – admittedly, it was a high-profile person in a position of considerable influence – but still, Tom, it was just one, single name, and look what happened!”
“When you write letters to the Director of National Intelligence – as well as to the Inspectors General of the departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security – which allege that family members of the Deputy Chief of Staff for the United States Secretary of State are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and also suggest that person is, herself, part of an Islamic conspiracy to overthrow America,” I observed, “you really shouldn’t be surprised at the subsequent eruption of a political fire storm.”
“Look at the facts, Tom,” Cone insisted as he ticked points off on the fingers of this left hand, “her father graduated from Aligarh Muslim University, a radical Muslim school. She was raised in Saudi Arabia. Her mother is a professor of sociology there, in Jeddah. Her father, her mother and her brother are all connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives or organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood has a publicly declared agenda to bring down Western society through a process they call ‘civilization jihad.’”
“So?” I prodded.
“So there she is,” Cone snarled, “sitting at the right hand of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And what’s this Abedin woman been up to, exactly? I’ll tell you – she’s talked Clinton into letting a Muslim Brotherhood leader, Tariq Ramadan, into the United States; got the State Department to participate in the Istanbul Process to establish Sharia law worldwide; obtained de-facto recognition for the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate international enterprise, when, in fact, it’s a terrorist organization; she made sure the State Department issued Egypt a foreign-aid waiver so its new government, which is headed by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, receives all the money the terrorists need; and, if you can believe such audacity, she also arranged it so the Palestinian Authority got a check for one hundred and seventy million bucks to funnel money through the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas and Fatah. That’s what Huma Abedin, Muslim terrorist infiltrator, has been up to, and let me assure you Tom,” he railed, gesturing at the papers in his briefcase, “that’s only the tip of the iceberg!”
“But now,” I ventured, “by virtue of that one, single, solitary revelation, you have unmasked John McCain as a Muslim terrorist sympathizer.”
“All right, yes,” Cone admitted. “That wouldn’t have happened if we kept quiet about Abedin.”
“So it’s true,” I commented, “that it is an ill wind indeed that blows no good. But now that you know McCain is in league with America’s foremost enemies, what are you going to do about it?”
“Um… that’s why I’m here,” Cone confessed. “We’ve been trying to figure out a… strategy, I guess you’d call it, for over three days now and we can’t seem to come up with one.”
“Have you considered the possibility,” I pondered, “that perhaps you shouldn’t do anything at all?”
“That’s your advice?” Cone demanded. “That we shouldn’t do anything about McCain? How could you even suggest that?”
“Because,” I elaborated, “unlike most Republicans these days, John McCain is a thoroughly decent person and therefore, besides being unwilling to do certain things, he is also willing to demand respect for others, even those with whom he doesn’t necessarily agree. Obviously, he doesn’t believe that anything justifies destroying an honest person’s career and reputation for political gain, even if that person happens to be a Democrat.”
In reaction to my advice, Cone rose from the couch, grabbed his briefcase and strode resolutely up to the front of my desk. “Listen, Collins,” he proclaimed, “I know better than anyone else that what I have in here will wreck the Democrats forever, and I’m not going to kid you about it – when the Democrats are completely destroyed as a political force in this country, nobody will be more satisfied than me. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is, the contents of this briefcase will save the United States of America!”
With that, Cone slammed his briefcase smartly down on my desktop for emphasis. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to secure the latches, and everything inside spilled out in front of me.
Cone’s briefcase contained a copy of the letter Michele Bachmann, Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney and Lynn Westmoreland had written denouncing Huma Abedin to the US government; a shopping list for items at the Neiman-Marcus men’s shop; an 8 by 4 inch plastic food container bag with an overstuffed prosciutto pannini in it; four packets of Sweet’N Low, a bottle of Excedrin Migraine and, approximately ten pages of letter size paper formatted in double columns of nine-point Arial font, with the right column presenting the names of US government agencies, and the left printed with compositors’ dummy, using two or three words to a line.
“Lorem Ipsum Dolor, State Department… Sit Amet Consectetur, National Security Agency… Adipisicing Elit, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency… Ded Do Eiusmod, Central Intelligence Agency… Tempor Incididunt, US Attorneys Office… Labore Et Dolore, Federal Bureau of Investigation… Magna Aliqua, Department of Homeland Security… Quia Non Numquam, Federal Aviation Agency… Eius Modi Tempora, US Army Southern Command,” I read. “Gee whiz – these Muslim terrorist government infiltrators have some mighty strange names.”
Cone blushed bright crimson as he scurried to stuff everything back into his briefcase. “I… I… guess I better go now.”
“It’s your consultation,” I reminded him.
“Yeah… I suppose it is,” he muttered as he made for the door, turning to look back at me, his hand poised on the knob.
“You… you…” Cone stammered, “you… won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Now what constructive purpose,” I wondered, “could doing that possibly serve?”