[My Chain Gang, 1]

SHIMMY: Why do you want to work on my chain gang, Alberto Gonzales?

EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: An impostor staff found food to start something like a poisoning hotel. I'm taking over the whole world.

SHIMMY: How can you ever know, really, the sound coming from the radiator? Can you figure it out?

EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale.

SHIMMY: What happens if my Tora Bora box is not scooped every day and cleaned wholesale once per week?

EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: Two electrical, woodsy dogs are trying to cut long line branches and trying to line-attack branches. The slobbering, filthy dogs actually are government police going as: a) impostors posing as mice hiding beneath the stove; and b) the kind of mice who like to blow steam into a tray and make a lot of noise.

SHIMMY: What if I hire you for my chain gang and you wake up at night soaked from recurring nightmares of waterboarding, forced standing, sleep-deprivation, sexual humiliation, and sensory-deprivation?

EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: Mice looking like friends -- I sense they actually have squirrels they say look like friends. Sure enough, they do.

SHIMMY: I need my chain gang to open the back door for me whenever I want, and to roll the one-ounce jar of ground cloves back and forth on the living room carpet so that I can swat at it.

EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL ALBERTO GONZALES: The rubber is put over the mouse's face, for instance. They put a foot on the back of the neck and pull up on the rubber. Another person slaps the prickly rodent ears. Before starting, they tell the mouse, "When you want to talk more, nod your head."

Episode Twenty-One: "Who Wants to be Press Secretary of the Cuban Missile Crisis?"

RHODA: Mary, you're not going to believe this. Dana Perino doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.

MARY: Do you even need a high school education to work in the White House? What's next -- the Justice Department hiring Regent University Law School alumni?

RHODA: She's the Press Secretary of the War on Terror, Mary. You could say "Cuban Missile Crisis" and you might as well be saying "Rumblefish Spinning Top Hi-Fidelity Lunar Module."

MARY: Dana Perino suspects it has something to do with Cuba and missiles.

RHODA: She had to ask her husband when he got home.

MARY: The reality of history has been replaced by the publicity of history.

RHODA: How does an adult maintain any kind of self-respect if she starts a conversation with, "Honey, what was the Cuban Missile Crisis?"

MARY: Darling, can you tell me about the nuclear showdown that almost annihilated the planet in 1962? But would you please keep the noise down low? Because you're waking the lazy sunbathers --

RHODA: If the bombs fall, Mary, you and I will be obliterated in a flash as Dana Perino is escorted to a bunker with hand-picked survivors who will rebuild what's left of the world.

The First Lady

SHIMMY: What did it feel like when you killed that guy?

THE FURIOUSLY FLESH-ELEMENTAL LAURA BUSH: This giant has plugs in his ears and Shimmy leads him around by the nose.

SHIMMY: It was a clear night, 8:00 p.m., on November 6, 1963. What was it like to kill that guy so hard with your car that he was thrown from his small 1962 Corvair sedan and broke his neck?

THE FURIOUSLY FLESH-ELEMENTAL LAURA BUSH: Clearly, such a giant needs to resolve a number of lingering problems.

SHIMMY: What does it feel like to come from unpretentious folks in Midland, Texas, and then kill that guy who was your ex-boyfriend?

THE FURIOUSLY FLESH-ELEMENTAL LAURA BUSH: I feel obligated to tell the giant what someone once said to me: "Shimmy is a swindler in heaven who has been working under a veil of bureaucracy and secrecy to take us all on a thoroughly reckless ride into the paddock between her gushing paws!"

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part XI)

THE VATICAN: Whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace. This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Fluorescent Downhill Peacekeeping Despot

Truus de Groot thinks this leads right into the White House. There may be a legal and rational explanation, Emmeline Pankhurst said, but she doesn't see any on the face of it.

It appears to Dora Russell as an obstruction of justice charge: tampering with evidence, and destroying evidence.

Mary Tantrum Lawlor just realized that the investigation will be led by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the same guy who couldn't decide whether or not waterboarding was torture.

"What this does in a larger sense is, it harms the credibility and the moral standing of America in the world again," said Kat Astrophe. "There will be skepticism and cynicism all over the world about how we treat prisoners and whether we practice torture or not."

After it was revealed the CIA had destroyed tapes that showed brutal interrogations by its agents, Rachel Speght noticed that most news outlets refused to brand what the tapes likely showed as "torture." Doro Pesch saw an Associated Press article that referred simply to "interrogation" on the tapes, at one point putting the phrase "enhanced interrogation" in quotes -- which stands in direct contradiction to the U.S. Army's 1947 ruling that Yukio Asano committed "torture" when he waterboarded a U.S. civilian. In a different AP article, Karyn Crisis saw waterboarding simply called "harsh interrogation."

Den of Spies Redux

"Slow down," he said. "I can't understand what you're saying."

"Mayakovsky Tree, it was nothing short of a mock execution. They tricked me into the cat carrier with their vague sunshine clapboard promise of a pile of catnip and a t-shirt that smelled like Tony," I said. "But when I bent to sniff the primrose, the monk's beard, the buttercup of catnip -- the flower of Resurrection Day, the Easter daisy, the garden snowdrop -- when I bent my haunches to sniff, Tony pushed me into the cat carrier and shut the cruel latch behind me."

The Mayakovsky Tree wobbled in the breeze, shaking snowflake crumbs from his lowest branches. A squirrel scribbled rank claws up his trunk.

"A mock execution with blank ammunition?" he asked. "Did they press an empty gun barrel to your head -- like the Iranian students did to U.S. hostages in 1980 -- and click the trigger?"

"Dr. Kissinger wears a butcher's apron. He strutted around the sterile, metallic examination table. Blood flecked above his saggy, porcine lips."

"All things must pass, Shimmy."

"Dr. Kissinger pulled me from the bower of my cat carrier, his vainglorious eyes dim and vacant as the moon. Oh, you're a crabby one, young lady! he said. He weighed me and said I must see Dr. Yawn because I'm 8.4 pounds."

"For now the filthy stigmas of 'common sense' and 'good taste' are still present in the Den of Spies, where just one wide-mouth hissyfit starts the world’s crumbling cloister shivering," the Mayakovsky Tree said.

"Were I quiet as thunder, how I’d wail and whine."

"The heavens cannot survive without the songs and starry glamor they begrudge us."

I said, "Now they're sending me to Dr. Yawn in Skokie. Only Dr. Yawn truly can tiptoe on the roof of her soul, Dr. Kissinger told Tony. We don't have ultrasound equipment here."

"Mock executions are not necessarily torture unless they take place in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. If waterboarding is torture, then torture is not constitutional."

"A rat-faced dog with rancid breath stuck his grubby snout against my carrier when Tony paid for my Cosequin prescription refill. He scattered Purrlicious Chicken Flavored Natural Organic Treats on the rug when we got home. No one can make me eat them."

"Meadow, lie green on the earth! There is no gold diviner than ours, Shimmy."

Spill Your Guts, Wastebasket Enemy Combatant!

To this day, if a mouse is running a high fever, you rub the fetid little creature from snout to tail with sandpapered saliva and sometimes ask Glenn Beck to pack ice around its body.

Rubbing my body against the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant makes me feel cold, which Tony and Shelly think can make me sick. Cold does not make me sick; Glenn Beck makes me sick (even though he admitted in court that he tortured and killed all those Pit bulls).

Rubbing so hard against the Wastebasket Enemy Combatant until I knock it on the floor -- the shock and klangfarbenmelodie of crumpled paper spilled everywhere! -- can lower my defenses to viruses, but it does not make me sick by itself as does the knowledge that Nancy Pelosi rewards the Democratic Party for being idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. If anything, rubbing against the Wastepaper Enemy Combatant kills bacteria not yet inside my body.

Rubbing my cheeks against the 11 reams of paper stacked in the living room does not cause pneumonia. The reason why cold viruses are associated with matter is simply that, under very cold conditions, the War on Terror produces terror (cold products from matter) in microorganisms to stop cilia. There's the rub.