While we wait for Der Tag

(many thanks to DrBopperTHP for the pic) and I make like Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” and try to pull together a coherent “Sunday Morning...” out of scraps of notes and notions from a pocket full of matchbooks and cocktail napkins (and bears skins and stones knives), let us see if there are any Very Old Jokes kicking around in the footlocker that can be quickly made Y2K compliant and repurposed to better serve You The Customer.

How about…

A young staffer, new to the protocol of the building, came tearing through the halls of the White House shouting that the President’s best friend, confidant and most skillful advisor,

Barney, had been indicted for, uh, “leaking”.

Before he could make it to the Oval Office, Dick Cheney, (who was in his office cleaning his shotgun) used his Sith Powers to stop the kid cold in his tracks.

“Son,” he growled, “didn’t anyone ever tell you that’s no way to break bad news to your boss? Not that I give a shit, but doing it that way'll like as not get you zinni-ed or shot in the face.”

“N-n-n-o, sir,” said the terrified staffer. “How should I do it?”

“You remember how the Little Prince completely froze up and freaked out on 9/11? How he just fucking blew off all the scary news about Katrina? Punk can’t handle the hard cider, so you gotta tippy-toe up to it slowly, see,” Cheney muttered, half to himself. “So today you only tell him the stupid dog's up on the roof and we can’t get him down. Tomorrow, you tell him we’re still working on it, and that the little fella’s scared to come down because you found out he bit that sumbitch Fitzgerald on the ankle or some such. You follow?”

The staffer nodded.

“Then, after a few days of prepping him for it, you can sorta ease him into it. Got it.”

“Yes, sir!” The staffer turned to leave.

“Look kid, I’m going in to see him anyway,” Cheney smirked. “I’ll get the ball rolling on this.”

“Thank you very much, sir” the staffer said slowly. “And if it’s not too much trouble, there was one other piece of news that I was supposed to tell him.“

Cheney leveled his shotgun at the staffer’s face saying, “Choose your next very words carefully, pissant.”

“And you’re obviously so brilliant at this kind of thing. And I’m such a moron…”

Cheney lowered his weapon

“Yeah, whatever,” Cheney said. “What’s the other thing?”

The staffer paused for a moment to make sure he got it right.

“Tell him…that Karl Rove is up on the roof and he won’t come down.”

Late day fun-time Update courtesy of the WaPo

Karl Rove, Bullish on the Budget and the Border
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, May 16, 2006; Page A02
It's a heck of a curse.

Presidential adviser Karl Rove had almost finished his appearance yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute when it happened. Discussing the Bush administration's record on illegal immigration, he blurted out, "We're doing a heck of a job."

D'oh!

President Bush made the phrase a national shorthand for incompetence when he bestowed it on FEMA Director Mike "Brownie" Brown in the days after Hurricane Katrina. And Rove knew he stepped in it yesterday. First, he said the administration was doing "a heck of a lot better, uh, job of getting control of the border." Then he uttered the forbidden phrase, and it sent him into a syntactical tailspin: "We're doing a heck of a job -- lot better job at getting, at getting, uh, the -- the problem of catch-and-release under control."

Bwahaha! But the story continues.

Rove has a lot on his mind these days -- a fact hinted at in the introduction to his speech by AEI President Christopher DeMuth. "In Washington, the hens are clucking and pecking and the sharks are circling," DeMuth observed. "Still, he goes about his work with discipline, serenity, never permitting himself to lapse into vitriol at the unfairness of it all, even in circumstances of flagrant unfairness."
…

Well for the benefit of AEI President Christopher DeMuth, who like most of his political species was clearly bred for sensitive little feetsies perfectly adapted for obedient party-line toeing and not intelligence, here is Karl Fucking Rove on “serenity”:

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” -- Karl Rove, June, 2005

And here is Karl Fucking Rove on not “lapse[ing] into vitriol”:

Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals. -- Karl Rove, June, 2005

Po' Karl. It's all so unfair.

So, so unfair.