The sane and sensible residents of the Washington DC area – and yes, Virginia, there actually are such people – spent the Memorial Day holiday weekend at home, just like sane and sensible people everywhere. Instead of rushing off to a resort destination guaranteed, by definition, to be overcrowded with bozos who don’t know any better, I hosted a humongous cookout at my house in Great Falls, with the usual guest list and a typical menu which regular readers of this Web log can readily imagine, I’m sure. This weekend, on the other hand, being self-employed, if I want to take Monday off and fly up to Cape May, New Jersey with my friend Cerise for three days at the beach which have the prospect of being genuinely enjoyable, that’s my prerogative. And as it happened, my circumspect approach with respect to the situation was rewarded with the best beach weather seen in the Mid-Atlantic region since last year. So the first thing Cerise and I did after leaving the bed and breakfast was take a walk down the promenade. There, however, I was accosted by none other than Percy Alden Buckley III, key aide to Representative Darrell Issa, and staunch conservative Republican.
“Tom Collins!” Buckley bellowed in a jocular style. “What a coincidence running into you here on the boardwalk at Cape May!”
“Since Gretchen tells me you’ve been trying to get a consultation appointment for over a week,” I dryly responded, “please forgive me for being skeptical about the involvement of Lady Luck in this encounter.”
“I know you’re really busy,” he answered with a smarmy smile as he began to stroll alongside us, “but this can’t wait. I’m on the hook to come up with a strategy on how the committee can use Benghazi to get at Hillary Clinton.”
“Tom!” Cerise admonished, “you’re on vacation! And besides, you can’t go dispensing important advice for free to anybody who walks up to you on the beach, can you?”
“You’ll have to forgive my friend,” I explained to Buckley, “she’s not a Republican like you, and consequently can’t see why anybody would want to ‘get at’ Hillary Clinton over what happened in Benghazi when she was Secretary of State.”
“In that case,” Buckley suggested, “Let me explain. You see ma’am, Hillary Clinton is a criminal with a long history of real estate fraud…”
“I’ve heard it said that there was nothing to the Whitewater accusations,” Cerise interrupted.
“…and a co-conspirator in the murder of a member of the presidential staff…” Buckley continued.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Cerise insisted. “You’re referring to Vincent Foster Jr.? He committed suicide! Everybody knows that!”
“Everybody was told that,” Buckley shot back with smirk and a sly wink. “And there’s no reason to blame anyone for believing it, but I ask you, can Hillary Clinton prove she didn’t murder Vince Foster?”
“Of course not!” Cerise laughed, “it’s logically impossible to prove a negative proposition!”
“So you would admit,” Buckley argued, “that it is, in fact, possible that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster, correct?”
“To the extent,” Cerise replied with an exaggerated eye roll, “that the statement ‘If the moon is made of green cheese, then Hillary Clinton killed Vincent Foster’ is, technically speaking, a true formula in propositional calculus. But then, I think the statement, ‘Darrell Issa committed arson to collect the insurance money on his bankrupt car alarm business’ might be true without the requirement of a false antecedent clause.”
“Steal Stopper Car Alarms,” Buckley protested, “was not bankrupt! Darrell turned that company around and was making a very respectable profit when the accident occurred.”
“And those gasoline burn marks just appeared by magic,” Cerise rejoindered. “Next, I suppose you’re going to say Darrell was only borrowing those three cars he’s accused of stealing back in the 1970s.”
“That was long time ago,” Buckley asserted, “and furthermore, Representative Issa has never been convicted of anything whatsoever! And besides, we’re talking about Hillary Clinton here, not Darrell Issa! Does America need a seventy-seven year old closeted lesbian feminist with severe brain damage in the White House?”
“Why not?” Cerise japed, “America has already had a seventy-eight year old crypto-fascist puppet of the military-industrial complex with severe Alzheimer’s disease as its president.”
“Who the hell,” Buckley demanded, “was that?”
“Ronald Wilson Reagan!” Cerise declared.
“There’s no comparison!” Buckley proclaimed in a self-righteous tone. “Ronald Reagan has public buildings everywhere in this great republic named after him.”
“So did Caligula,” Cerise noted, “but that didn’t make him a particularly good emperor, now did it?”
“Excuse me ma’am,” Buckley said, turning to me, “Tom, I’m prepared to write you a check for a full ninety-minute consultation right now if you can give me a way to pillory Hillary! And I don’t care if it only takes you five minutes, either!”
“Well,” I offered, “I’ll tell you this for free, Percy – Representative Issa’s committee is barking up the wrong tree with this Benghazi thing.”
Buckley knit his brow into a tapestry of confusion and puzzlement. “What are you talking about, Tom?”
“Allow me to illustrate,” I proposed, hailing a young fellow strolling down the promenade, ignoring the world, including the magnificent Atlantic ocean only a few yards away, in favor of fiddling with his cell phone. “Pardon me sir, my friend and I here have a bet and we’d like you to help us settle it.”
“Huh? Um, sure, I guess so,” he ventured. “As long as you’re not, you know, selling anything, ’cause if you are, I just graduated from college with a sixty-thousand dollar student loan debt and I haven’t been able to find a job, so I guarantee you, dude, I’m not gonna buy anything, ’cause I don’t have any money.”
“No, no,” I assured him, “we’re not selling anything. We just want to know, what do you think of Benghazi?”
The young fellow stared back at me for a moment, thinking intensely, then spoke. “You mean, that punk rock group from DC back, like thirty years ago, that my parents used to listen to?”
“You’re thinking,” I presumed, “of Fugazi. No, we’re having a… discussion about Benghazi – a city in eastern Libya.”
“Oh, yeah, Libya,” he nodded. “Like they had this dictator, and I remember this awesome video of him getting killed that I watched like maybe twenty times on YouTube. What about Libya?”
“Hillary Clinton!” Buckley prodded. “You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?”
“Um… yeah, sure,” the young fellow affirmed, “she’s gonna be President next time, right?”
“No! No! She’s not!” Buckley yelled. “Never! She’s a criminal and murderer and she’s got brain damage and there are unanswered questions about Benghazi and she…”
A look of apprehension and concern spread over the young man’s face. “Uh, I gotta go now, okay? I hope you guys get your problems… um… worked out all right.”
“Just a second,” I requested as I took out my wallet and handed him a twenty dollar bill. “Compensation for your time. Thanks!”
“Wow, sure, thank you, dude,” the young man smiled with raised eyebrows and a glance at Buckley. “You… um… take care of your friend there.”
“Try not frighten them off like that,” I cautioned Buckley as I hailed an elderly couple shuffling down the boardwalk on their HurryCanes. “Pardon me, sir… madame… my friend and I here are attempting to settle a bet and I was hoping you could help us with that.”
“You’re not selling anything are you?” the old woman asked, “because whatever it is, we don’t have any money to buy it. We’re living off Social Security because those bastards on Wall Street wiped out our 401(k) accounts in 2008 and the only reason we’re here in Cape May this weekend is to visit our grandchildren, and my son-in-law could barely afford to bring us here himself.”
“No, ma’am, we’re not selling anything,” I confirmed. “We’d just like to know what you think about Benghazi.”
“Nice Italian boy from the Bronx,” the old woman recalled.
“And holy smokes,” the old man remarked, “was he in a lot of movies!”
“He must have been in thirty or forty of them,” the old woman confirmed. “I remember him in The Strange One, back in 1957, he was so handsome.”
“I believe you’re thinking of Ben Gazzara,” I speculated.
“Yeah, sure,” the old man replied, “great character actor and movie star, that Ben Gazzara.”
“We were interested in what you think about Benghazi,” I explained, “the city in Libya where militants killed the United States ambassador.”
“Oh, that?” the old woman acknowledged. “That’s what your bet is about? Look son, being a diplomat isn’t all banquets and cocktail parties in places like Paris, you know. It can be dangerous. Those folks know what they’re getting into. It can be just like the Army; nobody wants to get killed, but it’s a risk you have to take if you’re in the foreign service.”
“But it could have been avoided!” Buckley shouted in frustration. “Clinton took responsibility but admitted no mistakes! The embassy needed reinforcements and none arrived in time! The public deserves to know the reasons behind the tragedy!”
“And it looks like your friend here,” the old woman opined, pointing at Buckley with her HurryCane, “needs to start taking lithium. Come on Harold, let’s get going.”
“Just a minute,” I said as I pulled out two twenty dollar bills. “Please take these as compensation for your time.”
“Oh, all right,” the old woman shrugged as they walked away, “at least now we can get something decent for lunch.”
“You keep an eye out for your buddy there,” the old man advised, peering back at us cautiously as they shambled away.
“Excuse me,” I called out to a thirty-something woman walking the promenade with what appeared to be her tween daughter. “My friend and I are attempting to settle a bet and I was wondering if you could help us do so.”
“You’re not selling something are you?” the daughter challenged. “Because my dad got disabled in Afghanistan, and he’s been trying to get the VA help him with an operation he needs for over a year and they haven’t done anything yet, and my mom only works for minimum wage and we had to ride a bus to get here and we’re staying with her parents and we don’t have any money.”
“No, we’re not selling anything,” I assured her. “We’d like to know what you think of Benghazi.”
“That anything like Bin Laden?” the mother asked.
“Exactly like Bin Laden!” Buckley jumped in. “Terrorists like Bin Laden attacked the United States embassy in Libya and four Americans were killed! And it was all Hillary Clinton’s fault, but the Obama administration conspired to cover up the facts, and we want to do something about it!”
“Who’s this ‘we” you’re talking about?” the mother wondered.
“Congress!” Buckley proudly proclaimed.
“You’re in Congress?” the daughter asked.
“Not me, exactly,” Buckley sought to clarify. “I work for a congressman.”
“Then can you ask your boss to please do something about the VA and the minimum wage? I need braces ’cause I have these rabbit teeth, see? And we can’t pay for them and I’m gonna have to look goofy like this until I’m like Mom’s age or something and hope I can afford it then.”
“And could you stop trying to repeal Obamacare?” the mother implored. “For the first time since my husband came home in a wheelchair three years ago, I can finally get my kid a pediatrician and have enough money for food and medicine!”
“Obamacare is socialism!” Buckley exploded. “It’s going to make you adopt a dependent attitude and ruin the economy! And raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment and poverty, not the other way around!”
“How come you guys in Congress don’t do something about the IRS giving all that money to billionaires?” the daughter demanded. “How come they get everything and we get practically nothing?”
“Without those billionaires,” Buckley ranted, “your mother here wouldn’t have the job she’s got! Those billionaires create the wealth of our nation by accumulating the capital that makes employment possible and stabilizing markets through trading derivative financial instruments! They deserve all the tax incentives Congress can provide! Now tell me, what do you two think about Congress investigating what happened at Benghazi?”
“I think,” the mother asserted as she took her daughter’s hand and turned to walk away, “that if somebody who talks like you wants to do it, then it’s probably not going to do me or my girl any good.”
“Wait!” I exclaimed as I produced a hundred dollar bill. “Please, take this as compensation for your time.”
“Okay,” the mother sighed as she took the banknote and perused it curiously, holding it up to the light. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these new ones. Lots of colors besides green.”
“So there are,” I agreed as the pair walked away, the daughter surreptitiously turning her head back at Buckley to make a face and quickly stick her tongue out at him.
“Damn it, Tom,” Buckley fumed. “What’s the point of all this, anyway?”
“That nobody outside the Beltway knows or cares what Darrell Issa and his cronies think of Hillary Clinton, much less about the story behind their version of ‘what really happened at Benghazi,’ and no amount of hype on Fox is going to change that,” I said.
“Come on, Tom,” Buckley complained, “there’s no way I can tell Darrell that! Can’t you at least suggest some constructive advice?”
“Remind Representative Issa,” I recommended, “that he’s dug himself into a hole with this Benghazi circus, and when you’re in a hole, there’s one important thing you have to do before anything else.”
“What’s that?” Buckley stammered, nonplused.
Cerise smiled broadly as she took my arm and began to pointedly lead me away from Buckley toward a nearby saltwater taffy shop. “Stop digging!”