Mrs. Johnson’s Wildflowers
 and other Tales of Old Texas

City: Washington
Scene:  The Oval Office
Time: Not so long ago

- C'mon in here, Dickster. I’m vexed, mister.  Your latest statements indicate that you aren’t even in the Executive Branch, and that you aren’t exactly in the Legislative Branch either.  Well, where the heck are you?  I’m confused.  Don’t you work just down the hall?  I know you aren’t a judge, uh, are you?  You don’t think you are, do you?  And I know you can’t be in the Judiciary either but uh, so uh, just where the heck are you, man?  I know half the time you act more like you’re working for private corporations than the public, but you don’t. I know you can’t be in the private sector cause the public’s paying your salary.  What you think, you’re the King of Guantanamo or something?  That mythical kingdom of the mind outside all known laws and conventions of mankind?  You think you’re some kind of a yo soy une hombre sincero, Guantanamero or something? 

- It’s true Mr. President, I’ve grown larger than my old position.  I like to think I’m no longer just one of these little minor, mortal branches of government, you know, but the virtual trunk of government on which all else depends.  I’m thinking about declaring my independence from the US altogether.  Sort of a Halliburton worldwide, if you will. Everywhere and nowhere at one and the same time.  I’ve got my buddy, Addington, working on designing a flag with my new coat of arms.  Looks a little like a defibrillator, resplendent, with crossed shotguns, two chevrons and a dead unicorn on the end of a spear. 

- But I signed a presidential order saying everyone in the executive branch had to comply with public disclosure regulations and you ignored it.  I have more luck getting information off Kim Jung Il than you.  Condi thinks we ought to appoint a special ambassador assigned just to your office.

- Look, we’ve been over this, Jr.  I don’t work for you.  I work for the American people.  I’m an independent contractor here for them.  They just don’t have any right to know what exactly it is that I’m doing.  And you, you’re still the Pretend President.  Don't worry.  I’ll keep kissing your ass in public as long as you kiss mine in private.  That’s our deal.  That’s always been our deal.  That’s not too much to ask is it?

- Yeah, but you know Dick, seriously, it’s just that you’re never right about anything.  Nothing personal but, uh, you know, you have the track record of a uh, I don’t know what exactly, a mouse in a maze or something and by the time we finally find the cheese you've lost it’s already gone all grody and smells to high heaven.

- Mr. President, here’s how I see it.  Let me refresh your memory a bit here.  You were a cheerleader, right?  Just keep being one, go out with your proverbial little pom-poms, Rove and whoever and talk to the troops and the kids and whoever you want to, and you can wave and wave and wave your tiny invisible little pom-poms to your heart’s content while I actually keep coaching the team.

- But I do still get to be the decider, right Dick?

- Sure you do.  Once you finish with your little cheerleader routines for the day to snow the public and you know, fly around and have all your vacations and all those other things that concern you, then on occasion I’ll give you a list of plays we need to run you can choose from and then you get to decide something.  I’ll give you a few choices that it’ll be hard to tell the difference between.  You won’t have to read a thing, short and sweet, then I’ll hand you something to sign and it’ll all be done.  Just like we’ve always done.

- But why do I get the gut feeling that when you do let me call a play, or propose a policy, you just shuffle the numbers around and get your tentacles all extended into every nook and cranny of the bureaucracy and have your toadies manipulate events until you wind up getting to run the play you wanted to run anyway? And I have to read about it in the newspapers later, or at least hear about it from someone who actually does read the papers.

- Well now, you know how you are – you go with Harriet Miers or Gonzales or someone every time I let you to yourself.  You get everything all bollixed up.

- Yeah, I heard that.  I heard what you said.  You said I didn’t have the nerve to tell you face to face about Harriet.  Did so.

- We denied that right away that I ever said that.

- Yeah like I’d believe anything out of your office.  Anyway, you’re worse, you got all that stuff about Iraq wrong.  Man, did I look stupid there. I don’t really care about the war one way or the other, of course, but man, oh man, did I look dumb.

- Mr. President, I’ve told you before that I was right as rain about everything I ever said about Iraq.  How could we have known that Saddam would secretly reconstitute the old Baghdad flying rug routine?  That wasn’t even covered by UN sanctions.  I have irrefutable satellite evidence in my possession that I’m afraid I can’t show you, Mr. President, because they’re too sensitive and secret for your level of clearance with my office…

- I understand.

- … of weapons of mass destruction and yes, some of them were on flatbed trailers, just like I said, being flown out of Iraq at night on a whole fleet of flying carpets - some of them were quite pretty by the way - no doubt straight to bin Laden, who is actually Saddam’s long lost illegitimate little brother, not many people know that, but I do.

- For real?  Wow!

- I wouldn’t lie to you, Mr. President.  We have one of the chief designers of the whole thing, a certain rug merchant named Ali Baba.  We have him in custody somewhere but I can’t tell you where.  Some say he was a thief but we believe that was just his cover story he used to keep his real mission swept under all the rugs.  We have satellite intercepts of him making numerous references to rugs in his dealings with a lot of unnamed foreigners.

- But you said he was a rug dealer in Iraq, with who and about what else would he be talking about but rugs?

- That's just he wanted us to think too, before we were able to break him down.

- Come to think of it I think I've heard about him somewhere.  Maybe in one of the briefings I missed or maybe I read about him in one the intelligence briefings I never bother to read anyway or something.  Anyway, yeah, name sounds familiar, go on ahead with your story.

- Well, he wouldn’t talk at first until we tortured the crap out of him.  Then, man by the end of those special interrogations this guy was telling us his name was Lucy in the Sky and he was from Mars, I’m telling you it was rich, really quite humorous.  I’ve got the tapes in my office if you want to see them.  Last week he told us he shot Kennedy five years before he was born.  And we’re starting to think there just might some credibility to his story.

- No way!

- Way, Mr. President.

- That’s amazing.  Ok, you keep up the good work then.  I’m sorry I doubted you ever, Dickie.  But about those torture tapes, nah, I know you like to watch that stuff but I think I’ll take a pass.  I just don’t have time, I need to keep practicing my new cheerleader routines er, I mean my speechifying spiels, in case we change our policy again.  Geesh, on Iraq alone I bet I’ve had to learn about a gazillion different slogans to pretend like we’re making progress and we have a plan even though we just keep doing the same thing over and over and losing worse every day.  Man, it gets me tired, sometimes, Dick, you know, people just don’t realize how tough my job is sometimes.

- Well, I do know, Mr. President and I want you know the nation appreciates it.  But yeah, you’re right I really do get a kick out of watching those tapes of screaming people.  I just think they’re a hoot and half.  I use ‘em to relax and help me fall asleep at night.  I think the innocent ones scream louder than the guilty, not that we can really tell who's who after a while, since eventually all of them will confess to anything the inquisition wants them to say.  After a while all their stories just all just run together and start to sound alike.   You’d think they were just telling us what they thought we wanted to hear.

- But yeah Dickie, seriously, here’s my problemo.  For instance, member when I wanted tax breaks for the wealthy and you wanted tax breaks for the wealthy too, and we both wanted essentially the same things?  But where you wanted capital gain cuts for yourself I wanted to reduce the tax on stock dividends for me, member that?  I overruled you.  I decided.  You pretended to agree with me but then you went off and met with the leaders of congress and what do you know, the bill came out with your stuff in it and not mine.

- Coincidence.

- Yeah but it seems like it’s been a coincidence like, 3000 times in a row.  You always get what you want and I never do.  Like social security or immigration or education or the environment...  All these things I said I wanted to do, but none of ‘em ever get got done.  The only thing that ever happens is the really bad stuff you really want to do and none of the good stuff.  I don’t think that’s fair.

- But don’t I let you proceed with all these pet projects of yours, Mr. President?

- Yeah, but you just give them the old lip service, Mafioso-style and they wind up dead in the water somewhere with concrete blocks tied to their ankles.  So how do I know you aren’t really just giving all the stuff I want to do the old kiss of death and the old heave ho behind the scenes?

- You don’t really believe that, do you Mr. President?  Would I do that?  Besides remember our deal.  It was cut and dried.  When we met all those years ago in Austin and you said you had doubts if you really even knew enough to be president.  You said you didn’t know a blessed thing about foreign policy and economics and stuff and you didn’t really even know if you had the guts and drive and wherewithal to do the job even if you had it.  Member?  But at the same time you thought that actually being president and getting to fly around in your own big old plane would be really cool – neato - was the exact word I think you used, Mr. President.

- Yeah, yeah, I know.  I member.

- And so I said I would do the hard things like read and direct the government and you could be the sell out er, I mean, the seller of our policy to the public, and you know the uh, “decider guy” or whatever you want to call yourself.  And that’s just exactly what we’ve done.  I’ve kept to my end of the bargain.  We have the perfect setup.  I leave the politics and the public relations and the pontifications to you and Rove and you leave most everything else and the actually making of the policy to me. Between the two of us we almost make a whole presidency.  So see, we have all the trappings of power right in our hands.  What more do you want?  You have the trappings and I have all the power.

- Yeah, yeah, I know, but golly, look at how unpopular I am.  Everybody blames me for all this stuff you told me to do.  And I know it’s not cause I haven’t sold it hard, because I’m really, really persuasive in small groups, quite affable, you know, everybody says so.

- Well yes, but you do have to admit you do have a certain odd ability to mangle your lines from time to time.

- I know but I’ve decided that that’s part of my charm.  It’s just that sometimes they trick me up when I go off script and try to use some of those multi-many-mufti-syl-syll-abrick-all-bric-a-brackical words, that I get a little confused.

- You’re referring to multisyllabic, I suppose?  But hey, who cares as long as it makes you happy?  Actually, I think we make a great team, Goethe couldn’t have designed a better plot for Mephistopheles than the deal we’ve got going between us here.

- I’ve told you before that don’t care what your hunting buddies think about it, Dickie, and I don’t care what kind of foreign rifle they shoot with or what kind of diseases they have.  I just don’t understand why my daddy didn’t warn me more about you and your buddies in the first place and how you all might just take over some day.

- Actually he did.  But that was actually a plus for us because you always do just the opposite of what your daddy tells you to do even if you think it’s wrong because you think it makes you seem independent.  That way you can say that nobody can tell you what to do.

- And nobody can either, and don't you forget it.  But you know, Dick, you’re just a bad man.  You’re like that Mr. Potter.  You know in the old Jimmy Stewart movie, when Mr. Potter offers him a job for a lotta money and Jimmy Stewart is all excited and reaches across the desk and starts to shake his hand, but then stops half way, you know, and suddenly realizes what he’s getting into and stops…  Member that, that Christmas movie?  Then he calls mean old Mr. Potter a scurvy little spider.  Member?

- I don’t believe in Christmas, Mr. President.

- Well that’s what I should have done.  I should have stopped right there and kept my political virginity.  Heck, I knew it wasn’t quite right.  I knew I didn’t know what I was doing when I took this job.  But you told me and Karl, he told me too, that you guys would get me through it.  And you’ve all been worse at this than I would have been on my own.

- Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. President.  And let me clue you in.  You know down in Texas where Mrs. Johnson’s wildflowers grow?  Well there’s a kind of secret society there, a nexus and a plexus among the lexuses between a lot of big interests in this country and they cross pollinate with a whole lotta conservatives in the military, industrial, intelligence, high finance and petro industries and meet up in good old unregulated Texas from time to time and they want things done certain ways in this country.  
   They did it with Johnson and Brown and Root and Vietnam and now we’re doing it with Bush and Halliburton and Iraq.  And they liked you, they really did, for this job, just like they liked your daddy before you in his day, but they thought you might be a little green and so they knew you might need a minder, if you know what I mean.  That’s me, that’s why I’m here.  Saavy? So anyway, too bad, quit whining, we’re stuck with each other now.  Nothing we can do about it.  And next time you go home and see Mrs. Johnson’s nice wildflowers you think about what I’ve just told you.

- But I don’t like it anymore, Dickie, none of it’s as fun anymore.  It’s too real.  I’m thinking about making some changes around here in the way we operate.

- No way, Mr. President, we can’t let you do that.  That’s not our deal.

- But I can if I want.  What if I really want to?

- Then you know what’ll happen because you know what I have on you.  Member?

- Oh, oh yeah, (His face darkened, then reddened, then darkened again).  Yeah, yeah I forgot about all that stuff.  I thought maybe you had too.  That’s another thing, where did you get all that stuff on me anyway?  How did you even find out about all that stuff?

- No matter, Mr. President.  Let’s just say I have my ways.  And I have a few friends who always like to win at the end of the day.  And they’re the ones I happen to work for too.

- But that’s so long ago, gee you wouldn’t still tell on me now would you Dickie, after all we’ve been through?

- In a heartbeat, Mr. President.  Even one of my irregular ones.  And they’d never even know it was me.