“Do you have any idea, Congressman, why the White House continues at this late hour to refuse to confirm the story of the assassination?”
“I think it goes without saying that we’re in a sensitive area here, and consequently they want to move cautiously on this whole thing. I think they want, first off, to gauge the public reaction here at home, and then of course there is the reaction around the world to consider. On the one hand you’ve got our allies who depend upon us for support, and on the other hand you’ve got our enemies who are always on the lookout for some chink in our armor, and if you keep all that in mind, then I think you have to agree that in the long run it is probably in the interest of our integrity and our credibility to cover this whole thing up. I would think that some such reasoning as that is going on behind the scenes at the White House right now.”.”Has the First Lady been notified?”
Oh, of course.”
“What was her reaction?”
“Well, she was understandably quite overcome in the first moment. But, as you know, she is a very decorous woman, even in moments of great emotion. Consequently, her immediate reaction was to note that the manner in which the assassin went about the assassination was in extremely bad taste. The baggie aside for the moment, she thinks that at the very least the President should have been slain in a shirt and a tie and a jacket, like John F. Charisma. She says there was a suit fresh from the dry cleaners in the closet at the hospital, and that it really shows that the assassin was a person of very poor breeding to have failed to recognize how important it is for the President, of all people, to be neatly and appropriately garbed at all times. She said she just had to wonder about the upbringing of a person who would forget something like that. She said she didn’t want to blame the assassin’s family, until she knew all the facts, but it was clear she felt there probably could have been a wee bit more attention given to good grooming in his house when the assassin was growing up.”
“Congressman Fraud, there has been some speculation that the President’s assassination is a reprisal for the destruction yesterday of the city of Copenhagen. What do you think of that idea?”
“Not very much.”
“Can you explain?”
“Well, it just doesn’t make any sense. The President himself went on television, after all, and explained to the American people the situation in Denmark and why we might have to destroy Copenhagen. Now he didn’t have to do that, you know — but he did, because he wanted the people to have all the facts. So I just don’t see how you can fault him there. And, I must say, in praise of this great country, that except for a few elderly people out there in Wiseonsinand they of course turned out to be of Danish extraction, and obviously didn’t have any objectivity on this matter at all — but except for those few irresponsible demonstrators out there shouting dirty words in Danish, the overwhelming majority of the people of this country have taken the destruction of Copenhagen with the wonderful equanimity and solidarity we have come to expect of them in matters like this. No, I just can’t see where somebody is going to assassinate the President for a sound policy decision such as this one, and that even goes for a madman. No, he had the mandate of the people here, lunatics included.”
“And the mandate of the Congress as well?”
“Well, of course, as you know, there are unfortunately a very few Congressmen and Senators — "
guess you could call them headline seekers who will go so far as to try to make political hay out of the bombing of a little Godforsaken village out in the middle of nowhere, some crossroads nobody has ever heard of before and surely after the bombing will never hear of again — so I leave it to you to imagine what such politicians are going to do with the nuclear destruction of a place like Copenhagen. In their behalf, however, let me say that even they would not be so reckless as to assassinate the President because of a difference of opinion over some thing like bombing sites. I mean, nobody’s perfect. One President chooses this target, one President chooses that target, but fortunately we have in this country a political system that can accommodate itself to that kind of disagreement, without recourse to assassination. And by and large I think you can say that in the end the mistakes in judgment and so on shake themselves out, and we pretty much destroy the places that need destroying. It seems to me, in fact, that as regards the destruction of Copenhagen, you’ll find that even among the President’s staunchest critics in the Senate, there was a sense that a decision of that magnitude simply couldn’t have been arrived at lightly or arbitrarily. I think most of the truly responsible members of the Congress feel as I do, that having made a strong show of strength such as this in Scandinavia now, we are not going to get ourselves bogged down there later the way we did in Southeast Asia.”
“So you see no connection between the ‘Something is Rotten in Denmark’ speech and the assassination?”
“No, no. Frankly I can’t believe that the murder of the President has to do with anything he has ever said or done, including his courageous remarks in behalf of the unborn and the sanctity of human life. No, this is one of those wild, crazy acts, just as the FBI describes it — the work of a madman, and, as the First Lady suggests, a pretty ill-mannered madman, at that. It seems to me that any attempt to find some rational political motive in anything so bizarre and boorish as stuffing the President of the United States unclothed into a water-filled baggie in the fetal position is so much wasted effort. It’s an act of violence and disrespect, utterly without rhyme or reason, and cannot but arouse the righteous indignation of reasonable and sensible men everywhere.”
“—the hairy, the half-cocked if you know what I mean, the hammer-and-sickle supporters, the hard-core pornographers, the hedonists, the Hell’s Angels, those whom God won’t help because they won’t help themselves, the hermaphrodites, the highbrows, the hijackers, the hippies, the Hisses, the homos, the hoodlums of all races, the heroin pushers, the hypocrites—”
“Yes, the tribute has begun, the tribute to the man they loved more than they knew. By trains they come, by busses, by cars, by planes, by wheelchairs, by feet. Come some on canes and crutches, and some on artificial limbs. But come undaunted they do, like pilgrims of yesteryear and yore, to honor pay to him they loved more than they knew. Reaped by the Grim Reaper before his reaping was due, he brings us together at last, as he promised he one day would do. And doing it he is. For in they come, the ordinary people, his people, barbers and butchers and brokers and barkers, tycoons and taxidermists and the taciturn who till the land. It is, I daresay, a demonstration the likes of which he who has been grimly reaped by the Grim Reaper did not, alas, survive to witness. No, during his brief residence on this planet Earth, and his three years in the White House, they demonstrated not to honor him but to humiliate him, not to pay him homage and respect but to shout their obscenities at, and display their disrespect toward, him. But these are not the obscenity-shouters and the disrespect-displayers gathering here tonight along the banks of the Potomac — banks as old as the Republic itself — and beneath the cherry blossoms he so loved, and in the brooding grandeur of this the city which embodies that which he who has been untimely reaped would have himself willingly laid down his life for, had of him it been asked instead of cruelly being stolen in the night from him by an ill-mannered madman with a baggie. Yet madmen there have been and madmen there will be, and still this nation has endured. And, I daresay, endure it will, while the madmen pass through these corridors of power and halls of justice and closets of virtue and dumbwaiters of dignity and cellars of idealism, leaving us in the end, if not stronger, wiser; and if not wiser, stronger; and if, alas, not either, both. This is Erect Severehead with a cogent news analysis from the nation’s capital.”