As I’ve noted in my Web log many times before, Washington is full of people who get up really early and rush downtown so they can be at their desks at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., all the better to spend the rest of the day screwing up royally. I don’t suppose anyone reading today’s post would be terribly surprised to learn that John “Pat” Philbin is a person of that ilk, but I must confess to having been mildly shocked, at least, to find him moping on a chair in the reception area of my office suite this morning, so sad and wracked with self-pity, he was even making my normally cheerful and very upbeat private secretary visibly depressed. Needless to say, I would hate for my one and only employee to be miserable, so first, I suggested she go out to Juan Valdez and have her favorite fancy coffee and pastry at my expense. Then I quickly showed Mr. Philbin into my office, where he could concentrate his morose talents on bumming me out instead.
“GZPZ, Pat,” I told him as he slumped down onto the couch, “you look like five miles of bad road in the Dominican boondocks.”
“Feel like it, too,” Pat moaned, hanging his head in his hands.
“Holy hen [expletive],” I observed, glancing pointedly at my watch, “here it is eight-fifteen! Shouldn’t you have already been working hard at your desk for a couple of hours?”
“That’s exactly the problem, Tom,” Philbin sobbed, “I don’t have a desk to go to anymore!”
“What?” I was shocked, Dear Reader, simply shocked, to hear someone like Pat Philbin make a statement like that. In fact, I told him as much. “I’m shocked, simply shocked, to hear you say something like that, Pat,” I proclaimed as convincingly as possible, “what, exactly, do you mean?”
“Today was my first day on the job as National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell’s Director of Public Affairs,” Philbin sighed wistfully. “I got to the office at 6:15, wearing a new two-thousand dollar suit and a shirt with White House cuff links. But they wouldn’t even let me in the building! I had to wait forty minutes in the lobby, and then they sent this, this… GS-9 down with a letter. A letter that said I didn’t have the job anymore!” Philbin began sobbing, his prolific tears threatening to ruin the soft, inviting kid-leather finish on my couch upholstery. Fortunately, as regular readers of this Web log know, I keep a large supply of Dior handkerchiefs in my desk. Philbin accepted four of them from me, blowing his nose like a fox horn on the first and stowing the other three for later.
“And,” I speculated, “you had already given your notice over at FEMA?”
“Yes,” Philbin’s shoulders shook up and down as he sobbed, “that’s right, Tom, and they don’t want me back over there at FEMA any more, either.”
“What wretched, obviously unfair and incredibly capricious twist of mindless, amoral and fickle fate,” I implored, “could possibly have befallen a magnificently talented, impressively intelligent and selflessly dedicated civil servant like yourself, in order to cause such a manifestly undeserved situation?”
“That damned news conference last Tuesday,” Philbin wailed, “that’s what started all this!”
“Oh,” I replied, “you mean the one where you set up that dill weed Harvey Johnson to think he was conducting a press briefing, when all the time the audience consisted of nothing but low-ranking FEMA staffers you’d bullied into acting as cheap shills?”
“Yeah,” Philbin affirmed, wiping at his reddened eyes and sniffling.
“Well, Hell on a hockey stick, Pat, what’s the matter with the honchos over at FEMA these days, anyway? Have they forgotten how to take a joke? After all, who wants a bunch of party-poopers with no sense of humor running the Federal Emergency Management Administration?”
“And Mike Chertoff was the one who thought it would be so funny, too,” Philbin lamented. “He invited me out to Dick Cheney’s Undisclosed Location...”
“That’s one totally awesome private nightclub,” I interjected, attempting to cheer him up a bit. “Did you get to see the HUD Booty Call Pole Dancers?”
“Uh-huh, I saw them,” Philbin wept, nodding, reaching for another Dior handkerchief. “I must have stuffed a hundred one dollar bills in… various places. And Chertoff and me got totally snockered on Kristal and top-shelf cognac; then he pitched this insane idea for what he said was going to be the most talked-about wild-and-crazy frat prank of the entire G. W. Bush administration.”
“And so was Chertoff the one who suggested using Harvey Johnson as the patsy?”
“Of course it was,” Philbin spat out, disgusted, “the whole thing was his idea. I was so drunk and horny that night I couldn’t have put two ideas together in a straight line if my [expletive] life depended on it! ‘That Harvey Johnson is such a complete nerdtastic, dweebolicious ding-bat, he will never, not in a million [expletive] years figure out the people in the audience aren’t really reporters,’ is what Chertoff hold me. ‘I mean, just take a look at Harvey Johnson – that Ichabod Crane horse face of his; those jug-handle ears that look like he chased somebody from the House of Windsor all the way to Canterbury or some faggot English place like that to get; and that freaking twit-meister comb-over,’ Chertoff said. ‘Think about what a hoot it will be when we show a tape of him to the gang at the White House, up there at the podium, striking the pose, completely convinced he’s actually conducting a real press conference,’ he said!”
“So, you guys at FEMA play a lot of jokes on Harvey Johnson, then?” It seemed like a pertinent question for me to pose at that point.
“With those looks,” Philbin sneered between sniffles, “and how he walks; Jesus, Tom, the way his butt does this flitty little sashay – the guy is practically begging to have a ‘Kick Me’ sign taped on his back.”
“Yeah,” I sighed, knowingly, “there’s one in every crowd, and that Harvey Johnson, well, yeah – I only saw him for a few seconds on cable, but Katie bar the door, if there was ever a gawky, pencil-neck geek with worse looks than Alfred E. Newman, it’s got to be him.”
“Of course,” Philbin whimpered, honking away on Dior Number Three, “Harvey was asking for it, plain and simple. And that’s just what Chertoff told me – ‘Aw, come on, Pat’ he said, ‘just look at that guy. He’s [expletive] asking for it!’”
“No doubt,” I agreed, “and those questions! ‘What type of commodities are you pledging to California?’ ‘People aren’t heeding evacuation orders, can you speak to that?’ ‘The secretary and the administrator are on their way out there. What is their objective?’ ‘Are you happy with FEMA’s response?’ ‘What lessons did FEMA learn from Katrina and how have they been applied?’ And, on top of that, there were like, what – six measly, nerf-ball questions? I mean, really, is Admiral Harvey the Sailor from a small town in Amish country or something? Hasn’t he ever watched a real press conference before? Anybody with the sophistication of a Chevy Chase middle school mall rat could have figured there was something odd going on. I know you don’t have to be a genius to get into the Coast Guard, but damn! That’s one clueless, gullible sucker you got there, that Admiral Harvey Johnson!”
“Exactly what Chertoff said,” Philbin choked out as he wiped his eyes and started on Dior Number Four. “And Chertoff said that’s why Harvey would be perfect for this. But then, when I set it all up, when I kicked all those little suckers in the [expletive] and forced them to pretend they were reporters and made them read Harvey those ridiculous questions Chertoff made up, what happens? That SOB Chertoff goes on television for real and denounces it! The very prank he made up, that [expletive] eating [expletive] – the one he talked me into pulling off for him!”
“That certainly appears to be pretty low-down and dirty, no doubt about that,” I opined while oddly haunted by a feeling I wasn’t getting the entire story. A moment passed as I pondered, then I resolved to ascertain the missing essential. “Ah, Pat, tell me something if you will,” I gently beseeched. “When you and Chertoff were planning this prank, did he come up with the part about putting the cameras on the live world media press feed, or did you?”
Philbin turned white as a sheet. “Oh, no. Oh, my God, oh my [expletive] God,” he muttered, overcome by a wave of abject despair at the realization, “oh, sweet [expletive] Jesus [expletive] [expletive] me!”
“It was never Chertoff’s idea to do that, was it? And it wasn’t yours, either?”
“Oh, bleeding, [expletive] Christ on a [expletive] crutch,” Philbin bleated, “[expletive] me! [Expletive]! [Expletive]!”
“Let me see if I can reconstruct what happened,” I ventured. “You set this whole thing up, including convincing Harvey Johnson that it was a real press conference. So, Harvey mentions it to his staff, and one of them checks with the television networks and the networks say they haven’t heard a thing about it. So, instead of figuring out that it’s bogus and hanging up the phone, Harvey’s flunky tells the press it’s real – and the flunky does that like, what, fifteen minutes before it’s supposed to happen?”
“Oh, [expletive]!”
“Uh-huh, right. And then, the networks have a massive cow, thinking that somebody’s trying to jerk them around, who knows, maybe one of their competitors? Sure – so they scramble like ants doused with scalding water, rattling cages all over the FEMA press liaison offices, setting up telephone connections so they can participate…”
“Jesus [expletive] Christ, [expletive]!”
“And the contractors who work in FEMA media support, what do they know? Why, nothing, of course. Since Day One, all they’ve gotten is the mushroom treatment – kept in the dark and fed bull [expletive]. So as soon as FEMA staff start screaming “Press briefing, press briefing…”
“[Expletive] the [expletive] Virgin Mary’s [expletive]!”
“Yeah, of course – so they flip the usual switches…”
“Eat [expletive] and die, Chertoff, you [expletive] [expletive]!”
“… and send the whole thing out on the live world news media feed. Sure they do. After all, that’s their job, isn’t it?”
“I’ll [expletive] kill him, that [expletive] piece of [expletive] [expletive] [expletive]!” Philbin proclaimed as he rose to his feet, a livid, insane anger having completely replaced his sorrow and self-pity. “I’m going down to his office right now!”
“Okay,” I said, deftly stepping behind him, “but before you do, I think I should probably take this sign off your back.”
“What!”
Philbin turned around abruptly, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. I guess they must have taped it on him while they were throwing him out of the National Intelligence Directorate, maybe about ten minutes of seven or so. That meant he’d been wearing it for nearly two hours now – out into the street, as he stood on the curb hailing a taxi, and walking down the block, through the bustling lobby to the elevators and up in one of them, surely filled with people at that hour, to the floor where my office is located, into the reception area, in front of my private secretary, and now, for a considerable time, sitting here in my office on the couch.
Philbin realized that too, I guess, as he read it, turned a striking shade of vermillion and rushed out, not saying another single, solitary word; it read:
2 STUPID 2 EVEN WORK 4 DHS
Boy howdy, that Mike Chertoff – what a card.