The Way Forward

The scene: Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld hunkered down in the bowels of the White House, in a place where no one else will hear…

“Well,” Cheney says, “they’re not buying it. We gotta drop it. Don’t mention it again.”

“I know, I know,” Bush grudgingly agrees. “I just really liked ‘stay the course’. You know, like John Paul Jones.” He throws one hand behind his back and leans forward, the other hand holding an imaginary spyglass. “Damn the torpedoes! Stay the course!”

“That wasn’t John Paul Jones,” Rumsfeld says. “They didn’t have torpedoes in the Revolutionary War.”

“Whatever,” Bush says. “Anyway, now what are we going to say?”

“Well,” says Cheney, “I know what we can’t say. We can’t say anything remotely like ‘escalation’ or ‘increase the number of troops.’ ‘The way forward’ was good, Rummy.”

“Yeah, well there’s more where that came from,” Rumsfeld snaps his fingers like a crapshooter. “And don’t call me Rummy.” He turns to give the Vice President a dirty look before continuing. “How about this: augmentation, not escalation.” He grins at the Preside and raises his eyebrows, not unlike Groucho Marx.

“I like it,” says Bush.

“When I think of augmentation,” offers Cheney, “I think of breast augmentation.”

“That’s the beauty of it. Tits. Who doesn’t like tits?”

“I like tits,” Bush chimes in.

“Now, dig this, baby,” and the former Shock and Awe shitkicker crouches and draws up his hand, pointing it like a pistol at Dick Cheney’s head, “troop surge."

“What about the benchmarks,” Bush asks. “What are the benchmarks? Last night Laura told me I wouldn’t know a benchmark from a broomstick. What exactly is a benchmark?”

“Look it up,” Rumsfeld says.

“That’s what Laura said. Is there a dictionary down here?”

“Dictionary?” Rumsfeld hisses. “We don’t need no stinking dictionary.”

“Words mean whatever the hell we say they mean,” Cheney says.

“Thank you, Humpty-Dumpty,” Rumsfeld says.

Cheney returns the dirty look.