Buffoonery in D.C.?

Putting false things firsst on April 1st

FRANK MIELE

WASHINGTOON (AF) - It's a new day in America.

President Bush on Friday signed Executive Order 4-01-07, giving himself and future presidents the unprecedented right to use a presidential subpoena as necessary to investigate corruption and malfeasance in the other two branches of government.

"This step is necessary," the president said, "because I noticed the courts have a subpoena power and Congress has a subpoena power and I don't have any power. That's not right.

"Karl [Rove] and I got to talking about it and decided to just write ourselves up some law. Everybody knows there is supposed to be checks and balances in our federal government system of government, but when Karl and I checked, there was no balance - so we gave ourselves some."

Critics in Congress and the Supreme Court questioned whether the presidential subpoena power was constitutional, but President Bush said he had been assured by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that it didn't matter if it was constitutional or not because "the Constitution is just a piece of paper, and scissors cuts paper."

President Bush immediately invoked his new power of presidential subpoena and said that he would use it to investigate alleged congressional abuses of power.

"What I have been hearing is that the Congress has been making policy decisions based on political considerations, you know, trying to make me look bad. This is very worrisome, I mean Laura is very upset about it - and I am - I promise - to get all the way - through whatever means I find - promise to get to the bottom of this abuse of powerfulness," he said.

"The people's business should not be run like a Las Vegas cathouse, but something stinks in the Capitol and I think maybe the litterbox needs changing."

President Bush said there was considerable evidence that Congress had taken several recent actions merely for political gain. He cited in particular the recent votes in both houses of Congress to strip him of his power as commander-in-chief and also the hearings last week on why eight U.S. attorneys were replaced.

"They get upset because I had my people fire some attorneys that weren't part of the team, but heh, that's my right. I get to decide who plays on Team Bush, don't I? People forget that I'm the decider."

The president said it was the hypocrisy of Congress which led him to agree to approve the power of the presidential subpoena.

"They think they have a right to investigate me and my advisers whenever they want. They say that the president has to be accountable, but that's easy to say when nobody is accountable-ing you, so I decided to 'accountable' the Congress for their decisions, too.

"Congress must not take action simply because it is politically popular to do so," Bush finished. "They must - they should - act for the good of the country. We need to get to the bottom of this, and teach Congress a lesson. No Congress is above the law."

By the end of the week, Karl Rove had visited the offices of at least four U.S. senators - Patrick Leahy, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein and Chuck Hagel - and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (whom Rove called "The Gang of One") - in order to receive memos, copies of e-mails, and depositions from staff members on the question of whether political considerations had played any role in the decisions to start probes into various White House decisions, as well as the vote to set a date certain for removal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

"It has become quickly apparent," Rove said, "that we have just started to scratch the surface of this thing. Everywhere we turn, someone is admitting that there were high-level discussions in the offices of senators and congressmen that the main reason to bring a particular bill or to hold a particular hearing was to embarrass the president. We are shocked that the business of the country has been handled as some kind of cheap partisan parlor game."

Rove pointed to several areas of interest that he thought would be fruitful for further investigation:

. What did Diane Feinstein know, and when did she know it? Feinstein's complaints about U.S. attorney Carol Lam were one of the reasons that Lam was fired, but Feinstein then argued the firing was political. Did she know what she was talking about when she thought Lam was a lunker? Or did she only get smart when it was apparent that President Bush was vulnerable to yet another attack on this issue? How about Sen. Chuck Schumer? How could he criticize injecting politics into the U.S. attorney's office when he has written letters to U.S. attorneys to encourage them to turn up the heat on the Bush administration?

. On this same issue, Rove said that he would investigate whether the common practice of senators putting "holds" on appointments of both judges and U.S. attorneys was a cheap political stunt.

. Various comments by senators were being investigated to determine if they were treasonous. Sen. Dick Durbin's comparison of U.S. soldiers to the armies of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and comments by John Kerry that U.S. soldiers were terrorizing Iraqi women and children were among those cited. Rove said this raised the issue of "What is treason?" and also the issue of "What is hypocrisy? "If the senators really believe their own statements, why have they not cut off funding for the war in Iraq?" Rove asked. "If they do not believe their own statements, why did they make them?"

. Coming back to hypocrisy, Rove recalled the daisy chain of congressmen who staged a veritable sit-in at the House office of Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana in 2006 to protest the FBI's exercising a search warrant in the hallowed halls of Congress to look for evidence of graft and corruption after $90,000 in cold cash was found in Jefferson's freezer.

. More recently, Feinstein and other "green" senators kowtowed to Al Gore during his post-Oscar return to Washington to preach the Gospel of Carbon Offsets. But Feinstein, along with fellow California Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Speaker of the House Pelosi, and even Gore himself often ride in private jets which spew carbon like confetti at a New Year's Eve party. Rove speculated that if 1,800 trees were planted after each coast-to-coast trip taken by the enviro-righteous to counteract the damage, that within several months Congress would have to pass a subsidy to encourage the timber industry to cut down trees elsewhere because the atmosphere was becoming too oxygen-rich.

. Finally, Feinstein's husband was a major beneficiary of military appropriations handed out by a subcommittee that she chaired. Rove said there was probably some innocent explanation in this case because no one could be so stupid as to be so corrupt so publicly.

Several senators said both before and after Rove began his investigation that they only wanted the truth to come out. They denied acting in any way for their own self-interest or to promote their own or their party's presidential ambitions. Sen. Schumer said he had a deep personal affection for the president, whom he called "President Bushbaby."

Rove said that the new presidential subpoena power would even the playing field and would allow charges of perjury to be brought against senators and congresspeople and their staffs when they "misstate the truth," by alleging that their decision making is not influenced by partisan agendas, or when they "pull a Scooter" and get the date of their wife's birthday wrong under direct questioning. (Lewis "Scooter" Libby is the former aide to Vice President Cheney who was recently convicted of having a bad memory.)

Sen. Leahy, who had led the congressional investigation into the firings of the U.S. attorneys, said the president was on a fishing expedition.

"We will not take the bait," Leahy said. "There is no way I will ever admit under oath the things that I say in the privacy of my office. I am not that stupid."

When he was told about Leahy's statement, the president said, "We will gonna see who is stupid."

By week's end, Rove had put together a charter flight to Cuba, and Team Pelosi was scheduled for an away game at Guantanamo against Team Terror. Reporters questioned Rove whether or not the Patriot Act had been used to arrest the leaders of Congress and send them to Gitmo.

"Patriot Act? We don't need no steenkin' Patriot Act!" Rove shouted. "They should have known who they were messing with. When they pretended that they were acting for the good of the country, they left themselves open to charges of impersonating a statesman."

President Bush held a news conference later to announce the exile of the congressional leaders to Cuba, and also announced at that time that Karl Rove has asked to be called Cardinal Richelieu in all future references.

Richelieu could not be reached for comment.

C. 2007 April Fool's News