White House Frustrated by Massacre

The White House is reportedly growing impatient over the hold the Newtown massacre made the President put on the public relations pushback he was set to launch in response to growing calls for limits on his limitless killer drone program.

One source close to this aborted media blitz told Shining City Gazette that before this latest disaster for the gun lobby the White House was preparing to echo the NRA pretty heavily in telling America that it’s not killer drones that kill people and it’s not presidents who kill people with killer drones who kill people or trigger-pullers in Nevada following the president’s orders to kill people with killer drones who kill people. It’s people who won’t stop engaging in questionable patterns of behavior that force the president to order people in Nevada to kill people and nearby people with killer drones who kill people.

Said deputy White House press secretary Nancy Wright, “Our best estimate is that it will be a good two months more at least before the gun lobby has ushered America far enough past Newtown that the President can borrow their lines of reasoning without re-awakening the exception Americans periodically take to senseless violence.

“Of course it will be a bit longer even than that if another gun-related massacre happens before Newtown blows over.”

Added Ms. Wright, “It’s just one of those things we learn to roll with in the public relations business. I mean, sometimes no sooner do you prepare to go all out again in reminding America about how much the country owes the super rich job creators than in comes a bunch of worse than expected new jobs numbers at the same time the super rich break some new profits record again, or in comes another non-partisan report showing that it’s not really the super rich job creators who create the jobs, or some high-profile super rich guy calls everybody but the super rich a bunch of numb-nutted parasites.

“So you take a deep breath, put all the glowing things you had to say about the super rich on the shelf next to all the glowing things you had to say about clean coal before freakish superstorm Sandy struck—and you wait till Americans are ready again to hear what they need to hear.

“And in the case of this campaign to set Americans straight about the President’s unlimited killer drone program, it wasn’t only the NRA-inspired sentiment that drones don’t kill people, the people drones kill kill people that we were all ready to start spreading.

“In Phase 2 we were also going to point out to Americans that when unlimited killer drones are outlawed only outlaws will have unlimited killer drones. And we were then of course going to put it out there that it’s all the gratuitous graphic violence Americans have been exposed to thanks to video games and movies and the Bush administration’s foreign policies and Julian Assange and Bradley Manning that raised Americans’ tolerance for senseless violence so high that the President can’t count on Americans to make him stop letting people and nearby people kill themselves with his killer drone program.

“Of course as a last resort we were prepared to have the President tell Americans that he would give them his drones when they pried them from his cold, dead hands.

“So anyway, the minute the gun lobby’s done putting the lid back on all the public clamoring for gun control, we’ll be out there squelching the calls for limits on killer drones. In the meantime, we’ll just keep invoking the limits on our ability to even talk about the limitless killer drone program in question so to speak.”

In a related story, the NRA got more bad news today to go with the Newtown PR disaster when the non-partisan Pew Charitable Trusts reported that their detailed analysis shows that it was the explosion of gun sales in anticipation of President Obama’s rumored plan to outlaw guns in a second term that raised the economy above the threshold below which he could not possibly have gained a second term.

Method to President's Fiscal Madness Revealed

The scores and scores of millions of Americans who voted for President Obama in the recent election and in the one before that were heartened today by reports that all along there has been a Democratic method to the madness of the President’s doing nothing whatsoever to slow down much less reverse the exploding wealth and power imbalance in America.

There is growing evidence that very early on in his first term, the President’s circle of economic advisors from Wall Street convinced him that just as there is a rock bottom that the Takers in America must hit before they see the error of their fiscal ways clearly enough to change them, so is there a rock top that the Makers must hit before they start looking long and hard at the behaviors that got them there.

“In a word,” one advisor is said to have told the new president, “the super rich have to want to change. There’s nothing we can do but get out of the way and let them all top out.”

In light of this revelation, the tide of hope is flowing yet again among Obama apologists, who now see his apparent selling of them out as actually a masterful jujitsu move whereby the irresistible force of the Makers’ own breakneck upward mobility is used against them to bring them down.

“It makes perfect sense,” said Juanita Reyes, founder and president of the Barack O’Bust super PAC. “He’s been doing kung fu all along.

“And I’m already tired of hearing the professional liberals gripe now about not having been let in on the plan. Somebody needs to explain to them in small easy words that rich people by definition are not stupid. You can’t just go around announcing how you’re going to outsmart them.

“That’s why after decades of this country’s building up of an unprecedentedly mammoth wealth and power imbalance in favor of the wealthy and powerful the President is playing along with the super rich and all their Republican henchwomen and men as they keep unbelievably insisting that to fix the economy the Makers broke we have to balance anything we take from the Makers by taking more from the Takers.

“President Obama’s got the right wing working right along with him to sucker the Makers into taking so much as to make them take to heart all the heartlessness of their taking so much from the Takers.”

Said newly hope-refilled two-time Obama supporter Nick Webster from Toledo, Ohio, “Leave it to this harmony-seeking president to have had a trick up the sleeve of his warrior monk’s robes the whole time.

“With all his zennish love of symmetry, all he wants is for the left and the right to look forward together to the grand moment when the 99% and the 1% bottom and top out at the same time respectively and we all come together on the same economic page.

“It’s time for the left to just sit tight and let the President take back all his clever campaign promises about not taking it when the Makers try to make a shambles of the social safety net, and also his promises about making the Makers take some responsibility for all the heartache all their taking makes.

“And it’s not the President’s fault either that it’s taking so long for the Makers to wake up. Who could have known that the super rich would prove so impervious to shame over all the hope-crushing pain they leave in the aftermath of their constantly breaking new ground in the field of inequity.

“My only concern right now is that the super rich won’t reach their moment of truth until after Obama’s out of office and Hillary will get all the credit for it.”

In related news, President Obama is reportedly drawing up a constitutional framework for his executive decision to unilaterally make Republicans stop stopping him from selling Democrats out to them.

SEC Audits Wall Street

Through a paid internship program sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a team of senior Securities and Exchange Commission officials have reportedly conducted an exhaustive after-hours audit of Wall Street practices in search of new efficiencies that would gain the nation’s so-called Makers an even greater share of America’s economic take.

According to reports, the key finding of this so-called A Team of Makers-in-Training is that Wall Street has not been taking nearly enough advantage of the blanket immunity from prosecution that the Obama administration has granted them.

Said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, speaking on behalf of the CEO Council spearheading the Fix the Deficit movement, “As much as it goes against the grain to listen to anything the SEC boys ever have to say, we have to admit that these interns might have a point.

“I mean after all, it’s risk-taking that makes us the Makers. As the embodiment of the American entrepreneurial spirit we think it might even be incumbent upon us in this deficit-stopped economy to do more pushing of the legal envelope, or the illegal envelope as the case may be.”

Added Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, “It’s embarrassing actually to read the section of the auditors’ report where the interns point out that nobody was ever even really firing any of the law enforcement bullets we all thought we were dodging after we got caught red-handed robbing all the Takers in society blind.

“I’ve been wondering all along what everybody wasn’t getting about Obama’s whole “Let’s all look forward and not backward” thing. I’m pretty sure what he’s been telling us is that the future he and his DOJ’s looking forward into does not include holding the money makers and the law makers and the war makers to any of the same laws that steer the Takers in the direction of our colleagues in the private corrections industry.”

“The bottom line,” said CEO Blankfein, “is that he doesn’t mean all the hurtful words he’s been hurling over a shoulder at us while he’s looking forward and listening for if not technically looking backwards at any Takers who make the big mistake of blowing a whistle on the money or law or war makers.”

Said CEO Moynihan, “The man’s one of us, full stop. Hell, he might be more one of us than we are. His ongoing gross misuse of all the political capital he amassed by hurling hurtful words at us Makers and selling the Takers a bill of goods about never ever ever selling them out to the Makers is really something to behold.

“You watch. Mr. Barack O’Populist is going to screw the Takers blue for us in this fiscal showdown he’s let us orchestrate.”

Said one member of the intern team speaking to Shining City Gazette on condition of anonymity because the terms of his internship don’t allow him to speak unless a Maker says he can, “We’re not necessarily saying Wall Street should have called in drone strikes on the Occupy movement, or that they should have started totally disregarding whatever amendment it is that did away with slavery, or that they should have begun physically threatening instead of blatantly bribing public officials.

“We’re just saying that when the foxes watching the henhouse have their own assassination programs and look the other way when big banks like HSBC get caught laundering drug and terrorist money, and when the likes of Condoleezza Rice are walking around scot free on the street, and when the foxes in question have a perfect record of never prosecuting other foxes, it’s kind of hard not to draw the conclusion that pretty much anything goes for those at the top of the American heap.”

As a small footnote on this story, according to sources, the auditors’ report includes a waggish paragraph in the Conclusions section where the interns tell the Makers that while they should feel free to pass out pink slips to any of their lawyers specializing in criminal defense, they probably should avoid smoking medical marijuana, and at all costs should steer clear of any and all patterns of behavior that might get them mistaken for a Muslim or a sympathizer with a Muslim.

Tragedy Unites America's Leaders

In the aftermath of the unbearable senseless shooting to death of little children and their educators in Newtown, Connecticut, Democratic and Republican leaders are banding together in a show of American bipartisan solidarity as they get back to work on the other issues facing the grieving nation.

Inspired by White House press secretary Jay Carney’s recent expedient of using another massacre as a perfect opportunity to keep not talking about the gun control reforms the majority of Americans have long been pleading for so the massacres will stop, spokespeople on each side of the political divide are now echoing the other side to the letter as they make their argument that the middle of a Global War on Terror is not the time or place to talk about children-killing drone strikes and the suite of other current and historical factors that might truly explain why people want to commit acts of terrorism against America.

In similar unison, both parties are now arguing with renewed vigor that the middle of a widespread life-ruining economic crisis is no time to start talking about the obvious and worsening plutocratic economic and political abuses that created the economic crisis, and that in the thick of the perennial electioneering cycle it is hardly wise to talk about the suppression of Democratic votes, and that the time to talk about catastrophic life-ruining global climate change is not in the thick of the so critical perennial electioneering cycle much less in the middle of catastrophic global climate change.

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney at a morning press conference, “Say what you want about the National Rifleman’s Association, it can’t be denied that they are among the nation’s most successful special interest groups in the area of imposing the will of the minority on the majority.

“Massacre after massacre after massacre, under the toughest public relations circumstances imaginable, they manage to muzzle any discussions that might impose majority rule on the country regarding gun control.

“With the very real possibility that filibuster reform in the Senate will undo the gains the ideological minority has made through gerrymandering in the House, we may well need to take a few pages from the playbooks of the likes of the NRA in these times when the role of government is to correct for errors in the will of the people.

“When the majority of Americans are standing on the wrong side of so many issues related to everything from perpetual preemptive war and warrantless surveillance and health care and economics to marriage equality and the prison system and women’s rights, we could do a whole lot worse than follow the lead of the National Rifleman’s Association.”

In related news, Tommy Ruggle, spokesperson for a new coalition of innocent children’s groups calling itself Children Against Mad People, told reporters today that he and every kid he knows don’t think the grown-ups are doing a very good job of taking care of them or their country.

Said Mr. Ruggle, “I’m only a third grader and I can tell it’s stupid to let everybody have machine guns that shoot real bullets. So can my sister in kindergarten.

“And also, it’s not fair that rich people get to take almost all the money, and they get to do whatever they want and never get in any trouble.

“And we heard that President Obama is killing children with bombs. Is that true? And also we heard it’s too late to save the world from getting too hot to live on.

“Anyways, we don’t want our grown-ups to be in charge anymore. Where can we get different grown-ups?”

GOP to Stick to its Guns

Offering a hint at the direction he will take the Heritage Foundation as its new president, Senator Jim Demint told reporters today that there is “no truth whatsoever to the lie that movement conservatives are abandoning their laissez faire principles in relation to the marketplace of ideas.”

Said the Senator, “No, we’re not all converting to intellectual communism just because we lost an election cycle. In fact, if the recent elections told us anything, it’s that the marketplace of ideas needs more deregulation not less.

“The 2012 election will go down in history as a study in what happens when non-market forces are allowed to warp the political discourse--when you start saddling one side’s ideas with onerous encumbrances like burdens of proof and science and fact checking and consistency tests.

“What isn’t the left getting about the simple laws of supply and demand? When there’s a demand for the idea that more deregulation fixes the economic problems caused by deregulation you meet that demand. When people keep buying the idea that the deficit is what you fixate on fixing in times of widespread economic hardship for the middle class and below, you keep selling them that idea.

“When you don’t, you catastrophically keep the magic hand of the free market of ideas from steering the ship of state in its natural rightward direction.”

Explained Rick Preston from the Cato Institute, “What happens when the jackbooted liberal idea police throw their monkey wrenches into the works of the free exchange of ideas is that market distortions start popping up all over the place. Suddenly otherwise perfectly viable ideas with a right to life are having to be bailed out in the interest of protecting the integrity of the free idea market.

“It’s not natural for one side to have to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars running an elaborate life support system for the idea that there is such a thing as clean coal, for instance, or that global warming is a myth, or that right-to-work laws have the best interest of workers in mind, or that voter suppression is all about saving the integrity of our Democracy.

“The thing is, the travesty being made of the marketplace of ideas isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s eventually likely to do very real damage to the actual free market. If we allow the demise of the idea that wealth trickles down, how long do you think we can keep basing our economy on that idea?

“So like Senator Demint is saying, no, we’re not about to abandon our conservative love of freedom. We will keep resisting any and all restraints on the ideas we come up with in our struggle to make America safer and safer for the job creators at the top.”

In related news, at a “frank” sit-down in the Oval Office on Thursday to discuss the upcoming fiscal cliff, President Obama reportedly told House Speaker John Boehner that he might be willing to budge a little more on spending cuts if some of the patent lies Republicans keep telling about the economy were put on the chopping block.

According to sources, the Speaker was not unagreeable to the idea in principle, but did express his nonnegotiable unwillingness to include in any deal the patent Republican lie that they are not telling patent lies about the economy.

GOP To Be Tweaked

According to reports from sources up and down the political spectrum, signs are emerging that Republican Party leaders are beginning to accept that, in the words of RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, “The do-gooders and the bleeding hearts now truly do outnumber the real Americans in this country.”

Explained Mr. Priebus, “I think what happened a little bit is that we shot ourselves in the foot by going all in one too many times with our apparently not quite foolproof strategy of lying our way to electoral victory.

“The hard truth is that we began believing the lies we began expertly telling ourselves. Even now we keep telling one another that a certain Kenyan Santa Claus posing as the President of the United States just beat us at our own game of cashing in on the red-blooded American capitalist attribute of looking out for number one by positioning himself as the giver of the most gifts.

“What we have to now accept is that all the card-carrying members of the new socialist majority in this once great country really do care about each other.

“That’s a big bitter horse pill we’re going to have to stop gagging on if we’re ever going to take back this country.”

Sources close to the Republican closed-door postmortem on the recent elections are telling Shining City Gazette that the GOP plan is to take all their raw outrage over all their boundless grounds for outrage and channel it into plays for sympathy from the so-called underdog lovers on the left.

Orwellian supergenius Frank Luntz is reportedly leading the way by reframing himself as Frankie by way of evoking an innocent, vulnerable boyishness to go along with his reframing of himself from Orwellian supergenius to wonderboy with a very special need to play with words.

Behind the scenes, Frankie has apparently already begun the process of framing all the racial hatred on the right as a much more sympathetic clinical condition along the lines of a sex or pain killer or shopping addiction. Similarly, conservative public figures are being asked to pitifully cower a little and flinch and maybe tremble when discussing their homophobia. For her part, Sarah Palin is being coached to stop calling it the lamestream media in favor of the new frame “meanstream” media.

Plans are also in the works to pull liberal heart strings by emphasizing the sad and unfair underrepresented status of conservatives and by playing up the one percent’s loneliness at the top. The GOP elephant is reportedly set to become a doe-eyed, emaciated shell of its former self. The public may even start seeing bloody stumps where priceless ivory tusks should be.

Said RNC strategist Paula Halliday, “Frankie’s really going all out. On the talk shows he’s even going to affect a stutter. Think about it—the human tragedy of a wordsmith who can’t spit out his words. I think Republican hearts might even bleed a little over that one.”

Added Ms. Halliday, “In local and state and national elections we’re going to start running cripples and borderline retards. Amputees and burn victims. Homeless people. Maybe more ladies, especially if they’re anorexic or something or they’ve been raped, preferably by their own dad.

“We can’t wait for all the heads to explode in voting booths all over America when liberals start trying not to vote for a Republican harelipped, tic-ridden, cross-dressing, club-footed Mexican national who has campaigned on the platform that he’ll probably fall off the wagon and go back to cutting herself if he loses the election.

“You just really have to laugh at the thought of the weenies on the left crying their poor eyes out for us on the right while we’re busy gaining strength through the weakness we’re faking to make a weakness out of the strength of their weakness for the weaknesses of others.”

Extra-Legal Killings to Become Extra Legal?

The Obama administration today began refusing to confirm or deny reports that in anticipation of a possible Romney win in the recent election it began crafting a legal framework for the executive branch’s intuitional killing of worldwide targets without limits or oversight or checks or balances or transparency or any kind of legal or constitutional or moral or ethical constraints or safeguards.

At a morning press conference White House spokesman Jay Carney said to reporters, “Think about it. Why would a president confirm or deny a course of action regarding a course of action he didn’t have to confirm or deny he was taking? Seriously. Do you really think I’m going to say whether the president is codifying killings I won’t even say he’s committing?”

In response to Mr. Carney’s perceived stonewalling, one reporter asked the press secretary if he would please at least confirm or deny the rumor that it wasn’t a legal architecture for all his extra-legal killings the president was putting together but a list of helpful tips for the person who would eventually inherit his or her own presidential killer drone program.

A visibly exasperated Mr. Carney then partly confused, partly placated the press corps when he told them, “You know I can’t do that, but what I will do for you is confirm and deny the rumor.”

The source of the rumor in question is a document Wikileaks has reportedly obtained that purportedly lists the president’s sometimes epigrammatical suggestions for the future inheritor of his license to kill.

According to an anonymous source inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the list includes the following helpful pointers:

1.     Periodically report that you are taking full and complete responsibility for your killer drone program, but only after periodically refusing to admit that you have a killer drone program.

2.     Whether it’s taking a true or false quiz or deciding whether or not to drop bombs on questionable patterns of behavior, always go with your first choice.

3.     Whether it’s playing basketball or dropping bombs on questionable patterns of behavior, when you’re in the zone, don’t hold back.

4.     Never flip a coin to decide whether or not to drop a bomb on a questionable pattern of behavior, but if you do, always go with heads.

5.     Remember that it’s sometimes better to just kick the dog or punch a wall or count to ten or walk around the block than drop a bomb on a questionable pattern of behavior.

6.     It is unseemly to commemorate kills with notches or decals of any kind on any article of office or bedroom furniture.

7.     In times of doubt about the humanity of dropping bombs on questionable patterns of behavior and nearby non-questionable patterns of behavior, just remember that you have a Nobel Peace prize if you have one.

8.     If you don’t have a Nobel Peace prize, just remember that the American public loves dropping bombs on questionable patterns of behavior.

In a related story, in an afternoon press conference White House spokesman Jay Carney today refused to confirm or deny reports that the gang of suspects in the unconfirmed or denied leaking of the president’s list of helpful tips for what some are beginning to call the next Hit-Man-or-Woman-in-Chief are now on the president’s so-called kill list.

Makers Take on Takers

Shining City Gazette has obtained a copy of the minutes taken at a recent strategy session held by the Council of CEOs spearheading the all-out, high profile deficit scold campaign calling itself Fix the Debt.

According to the detailed notes taken by an unnamed special guest stenographer from the Washington press corps, the Treasurer’s report was interrupted at the four-minute mark when an alarm in the A Class cleanroom where the meeting was taking place went off, indicating that the number of particles per square meter in the air all the so-called smartest men in the room were breathing was coming dangerously close to dropping below 400 times less than that found in the air most people breath in the average enclosed environment.

The minutes indicate that the breath-holding CEOs were preparing to escape to a nearby safecleanroom when Honeywell CEO David M. Cote turned up the dial on the room’s main vaporizing device, releasing the extra Triethylene glycol needed to kill enough viable airborne bacteria to allow the CEOs to breath a bit easier.

When the Treasurer’s report resumed, the Council then heard the good news that they had already raised over 200 million dollars to go toward their campaign to take raising their taxes off the table and take the social safety net away from all America’s so-called Takers.

This news was then followed by the bad news that the one percent of Americans making up the so-called Makers in society are so far only taking in a little over 93% of the money recovered after the Great Recession the Makers made.

Next on the agenda was the postmortem of the CBS interview in which Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein scolded old and poor Americans for having raised expectations regarding their own financial well-being too high for the Makers in society to reach the much much higher expectations they have earned as the Makers.

First to speak was Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan, who according to the notes, deadpanned, “Great job, Lloyd. But I’m wondering why you didn’t work the line ‘Let them eat Twinkies’ into your sermon.”

The minutes indicate that the entire Council at this point experienced some difficulty mirroring CEO Moynihan’s deadpan.

This difficulty was made more urgent when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “Or maybe ‘Let them eat Ding Dongs’.”

All CEOs in attendance then laughed outright when after Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said, “Or maybe ‘Let them eat Ho Hos’”, and after AT & T CEO Randall Stephenson then said, “Did somebody just say ‘Ho Ho Ho’?”, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon quipped, “That doesn’t sound like anything one of us would have said.”

The guest stenographer had some difficulty keeping up with the outbreak of crosstalk and hijinks that followed, but did make note of Boeing CEO W. James McNerney’s raucously received pantomiming of a hobo’s high wire act with no safety net below.

When Wall Street billionaire Peter Peterson gaveled the CEOs back to order, the Council took up the last item on the agenda—President Obama’s outrageous lack of gratitude for all they do.

After each CEO was given five minutes to share how he felt about all the hurtful words the President recently used in his feigned populist campaigning, Bank of America CEO Brian T. Moynihan, in an apparent attempt at mood-lightening humor, told his peers that with his terminally hurt feelings he was going to ask the Make A Wish Foundation to make the Takers make his day by showing him the love his money didn’t seem to be buying him.”

“It’s not funny, Brian,” said JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

“Not at all,” somebody seconded.