Maureen Dowd’s piece yesterday is pretty good actually. Good satire rather than themore normal kookie stuff.

Tags. dowd maureen dowd

Dick and Rummy are holed up in the den of Rummy’s Chesapeake Bay
retreat, Mount Misery, pawing through sheafs of transcripts of
wiretapped telephone conversations, hunting for inside dope.

Chinook
helicopters patrol the skies above the red-brick waterfront mansion.
Rummy loves the take-no-prisoners lineage of his $1.5 million getaway,
built in the 19th century by Edward Covey, an evil slave owner.

Winter weekends by a crackling fire are cozy and conspiratorial, now that the two men have nearby spreads in St. Michaels, Md.

These
squires of surveillance while away their evenings sipping from goblets
of Glenlivet and perusing the illegally bugged phone conversations of
any American they please. Getting in the holiday spirit, they’re mining
data to revise their naughty and nice lists.

"Check this
one out, Dick," Rummy says excitedly. "I’ve been reading Jennifer
Aniston’s conversations for the last six months now, and I gotta say, I
don’t get what she sees in this guy Vince Vaughn. ‘Wedding Crashers’
was funny. They shot that here in this village, you know. But I don’t
trust the guy. No way he’s going to give up lap dancers and be true. I
just don’t want to see Jen get hurt again."

Dick grunts.
He’s deeply absorbed in the classified reports on the F.B.I.
infiltration of a Vegan Community Project and a People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals protest against llama fur. He’s ruminating over a
naked picture of Pamela Anderson emblazoned with the PETA slogan, "I’d
rather go naked than wear fur."

"Porter Goss tells me that
Pam was shacking up with Mark McGrath – you know, he used to be with
that band, Sugar Ray?" Rummy says. "Listen, Dick, we need to jawbone
about this flapdoodle about our stateside spying operation that
developed while you were on your whirlwind tour of American torture
chambers in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Dick interrupts, "More torture."

"Some
pansies are making unwarranted claims that we should have gotten
warrants," Rummy continues. "But we can’t worry about the
Constitution’s fine print during war. Besides, it’s fun to secretly
blow off the super-secret court.

Sure, warrants would
have been no problem – the court has turned down only five government
requests since 1979. Why the dickens shouldn’t we go in and eavesdrop
on whoever we want? Who says we can’t do sneak and peak searches
whenever we dadburn please?

"Junior can try to model
himself after Reagan, but you can’t beat our old boss Nixon when it
came to channeling paranoia in a productive way. Nixon and J. Edgar
Hoover had it right: dark times call for dark measures.

"We’re
thinking too small, really. Let’s sic the I.R.S. on Murtha, McCain and
Feingold. Let’s bug Condi and Lieberman – those back-stabbing
sons-of-guns want our jobs. Condi has no clue who she’s dealing with,
right, Dick?

"I perfected the black art of infighting
before Condi was born. And while we’re at it, let’s tap Risen’s phone.
His story in The Times about our wiretaps was an outrageous invasion of
our privacy and an assault on our monarchy’s – I mean, our executive
branch’s absolute power. We’ll smoke out the rat who leaked that story."

Dick takes a sip of Scotch and nods. "More snooping," he says.

"Karl’s
new game plan of pretending to admit that we made some mistakes in Iraq
seems to be working," Rummy muses. "The Kid’s approval ratings are
picking up. But I hope Georgie’s not falling for that contrition guff
he’s peddling.

"We don’t want him to go wobbly on us. We
have a long way to go in Iraq. The Iraqi security forces are still
curled in a fetal position. Oh, by the way, Chalabi called today. He
thinks Iran did a better job trucking in stuffed ballot boxes for the
Shiites than we did for the Sunnis." He adds slyly, "You’d think we’d
be better by now at stealing elections."

"More fraud," Dick rumbles. "More rigged elections."

Dick points at the flat-screen TV over the roaring fireplace. It’s time for their favorite Sunday night program.

"It
isn’t on yet, big guy," Rummy sighs. "The Kid is yakking again to the
nation. He’s so desperate he’s pre-empting ‘Desperate Housewives.’ The
gals won’t be on for 20 minutes."

Dick glowers, sinking deep into his leather chair.

"Hey,
I’ve got a great idea!" Rummy grins. "You wanna read a phone transcript
of a big cat fight between Teri Hatcher and Nicollette Sheridan?
Mueller just sent it over. Hot stuff!"

Dick perks up. Half his mouth inclines, indicating extreme joy. "More Nicollette Sheridan," he nods.