From Republican Headquarters

“Dick?…Dicky? You awake?”

“Ah, here.”

“Alright, that’d seem to be everyone—down to business. The wheels are coming off the wagon, boys. Our man Mac looks more and more like a hack: He’s changing his mind every three days, his running matethough a looker—comes across as a little…light in the skills department, and the pair of them have looked spent for coupla weeks now.”

“Hit ’em!”

“What’s that, Karl?”

“Knockout punch. Has that blowhard Biden ever been seen with an infant not his own—non-white, preferably?”

“Come on, Turd Blossom, that trick only works once a decade. Voters are getting sick and tired; hell, it’s starting to look like there’s such thing as ‘too mean’. And hey, not to sass back here, but since when did mistrust of everything ain’t white become a party plank for us?”

“Probably about the same time trillion-dollar deficit spending and torture did. Let me ask you: When has the miscegenation card not worked? Bang that drum: Have you seen these crowds Sarah’s been drawing? Talk about fired up.”

“Listen, lynch-mob fired-up is not the same as Rock-the-Vote fired-up. It kind of looks, to me, like we’re tapping a nasty vein here. We used to be about NASCAR dads, not crypto-Klansmen. What happened to compassionate conservatism, ‘values voters’?”

“Um…that was campaign-trail hogwash, Hoss. Hate to burst your bubble. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we’ve never really been the go-to guys for compassion—or prudence, or honesty, or the human touch. Ours is the big tent of Joe Lieberman and Alberto Gonzales. You’re right, though; Gramps isn’t pulling it off. No use being a wolf in a temperamental and frustrated old man’s clothing. Horseshit doesn’t work without a healthy dose of charm.”

“For the record, I feel compassionate; that oughta count for something. Anyway, consider our bluff called. Even the old drones are turning tail: Brooksy, Lil’ Kristol, Chris Buckley and Newt Gingrich are so busy renouncing McBane on Fox News that our folks can’t get any airtime. Dick, you got any plans for reuniting the gang?”

“Well, I was creeping around the old CIA storehouse like always, looking for wiretap microphones. (My office ran out, and I suspect the pool guy at the Wyoming house has been inviting Soviet apparatchiks over to parties when I’m away.) At any rate, I found a few leftover exploding cigars—might be time to have a little reunion at the Capital Grille…Show ‘em what treason means.” [Laughs with quiet menace.]

“You mean the ones for Castro? We’re talking about our biggest fans, the cheerleaders who stayed bubbly when 70 percent of Americans wanted our heads. We’re not talking about Castro.”

“Aren’t we?”

“You should get some rest, Dick. I’m the decider: We’re not gonna syruptish…surteptish…surseptitiously explode members of The National Review editorial board. Talk about shooting your friend in the face. What happened to our principles and talkin’ to the group of folks across the aisle? Sometimes I feel like we’ve been coasting along for a decade or more by selling folksy, hawkish nonsense next to bumbling and alienating liberal senators.”

[Silence.]

“You guys are right; no way. Don’t know why I even had the thought. Anyway, now we gotta right the ship: no more lying, no more threatening, and no more baby insinuations. We’re better than that.”

“C’mon, boss, one last try: I’m getting good with Photoshop after that Iraq stuff. We could maybe throw together a birth certificate that says Bill Ayers fathered John McCain’s black baby with Michelle Obama. How’s that for a silver bullet?”

[Looks at Dick, who narrows his eyes vaguely.] “Um, yeah. You got my green light on that one, boy genius. Let me know how it turns out; I’ll be in my room playing Club Penguin.”



James M. Larkin ’10, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House.