The real news often goes unreported. Or unnoticed. I’d like to remedy that. This time, at least.
For instance, while the Mideast situation was getting uglier and uglier and uglier last week, DUH-Be-Yah, America’s Putative President, visited … the Delaware Valley, making a special appearance at Philadelphia’s posh Four Seasons Hotel.
I don’t blame him. They have the neatest fountains there.
Fairness compels me to disclose it was actually a Republican fund-raiser for a gubernatorial wannabe possessing what the regional paper portrayed as a “flushed, … squinting face, framed by new eyeglasses and a new, surgically made hairline.”
Yum. My kinda candidate. Doncha just love politics?
For an unprecedented $10,000 a ticket, if you were fortunate enough to be among the 70 ultra-select, financially flush attendees, you could meet Bush at this lavish event, temporarily be in his oh-so-memorable presence, perhaps even witness him jaw about the nuances of foreign policy and similar weighty matters. It was not disclosed if Bush played Culinary Roulette with his chances of passing out on an errant morsel of subversive food.
For $1,000, you might have shaken Bush’s actual hand or snagged a “Presidential Pooch Lover” gift certificate entitling you to walk his dog next time you’re in Washington. Uh, just kidding! Honest I am!
Mucho moolah – a million bucks – miraculously materialized, to the point where Philly GOP chairman Vito Canuso reportedly gushed, “I’ve never heard of anybody raising that amount at one event.”
Vito, Vito, Vito.
And they complain about the vending of Clinton. Soon, under the guise of fund-raising, the Republicans may be selling lost-button threads from Bush’s old suits as sacred presidential relics. What’s next? Presidential nose hairs? Earwax? Navel lint?
I know! A website hawking Bush’s discarded napkin notes – those diplomatic cheat sheets – pronunciation guides to names of “furrin” White House dinner guests!
Though I was otherwise occupied that afternoon, fortunately an Internet chat acquaintance let’s call “Nora Rue” was an eyewitness of sorts because her law firm’s offices are adjacent to the hotel. She made these trenchant observations:
Outside the hotel, a phalanx of demonstrators gathered – what she categorized as perhaps “100 Palestinians” – what local TV news called “150 pro-Palestinians” and what the region’s paper of record labeled “200 Palestinians and other Arabs” protesting the President’s visit.
“So I asked a Secret Service guy standing there,” Nora Rue recalls, “if I could ask him a question.”
I am thinking she meant to send a light-hearted, congratulatory, keep-up-the-good-work message to our Putative President. But no, she really wanted to confine her communications efforts to the Secret Service guy.
Courteous as ever, Nora Rue awaits his assent.
“So I asked him, has anyone checked their green cards yet?”
Hmmm. Is this a legitimate issue? Or just a deliberately incendiary question? Hundreds of “them.” In front of that luxury hotel. Mucking up the lovely view. Who knows what plots “they” may be hatching next? And have you taken a cab lately? You feel like you could become part of a hostage situation when all you want is a ride to your favorite nail boutique. I can just hear her mental gears grinding.
This is, however, still, for the moment, America, where blood has been shed to protect our, er, anyone’s, rights of lawful, free assembly and peaceful protest.
Even “THEM”!
Well, she continues her narrative, the Secret Service guy “stood there, looking like he was trying not to have a heart attack but holding in the laughter.”
Yeah, too funny.
About an hour earlier that afternoon, when Nora Rue left work, the Secret Service guy looked at her walking out of the building, “and he asked me, ‘Are you leaving work early?'”
These guys are great at articulating the obvious, aren’t they? Tapping into the pulse beat of the American public? Oh, or are they one and the same?
Sorry!
So Nora Rue just looks at the Secret Service guy and says, “I agree with Cheney on this one. I won’t be in the same building as that guy [Bush] either.”
History didn’t record whether the security fellow blinked.
Nothing happened there terror-wise that day, but she seemed pleased for an excuse to leave work early.
Hopefully, she’s a statuesque redhead. Otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend baiting MIBs, those Men in Black, as an alternative form of recreation. They’re armed, and certainly, under the right set of circumstances, dangerous.
And so, proclaiming she “had fun with the Secret Service,” she wiggled away, headed, I guess, for the Liberty Bell.