rlfj: Blog

Chapter 146 should be a lot more amusing for everybody and will play a part in future chapters as well.

I had an interesting question from a reader, who commented on how callous Carl was about Russian human rights violations. Did I approve of violating human rights? Well, no, of course not. I’m not a monster and neither is Carl. However, he is the President of the United States, not of Russia or China or Iran or Chechnya or any other place. If he spends the next four years squawking about human rights all over the globe, he won’t accomplish anything and won’t be re-elected, either. Remember Jimmy Carter? Great human being, shitty President! I have no doubt that Jimmy will loudly and publicly disapprove of Carl’s performance at some point. I am also sure that Carl couldn’t care less.

Quite a few comments on who Carl was picking as VP and Cabinet heads. McCain was a great choice; McCain was a disaster! Pick this guy or pick that guy! Too late, folks. Just like Carl, I had to make a pick. None of these people, Carl included, walk on water. Just like Carl, you will have to live with the choices. As Carl told Charlie, “Suck it up!”

I am amazed that nobody picked up on President Blue. It felt like the old Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, when Johnny and Doc Severinsen played ‘Stump the Band’ and dared the audience to come up with requests for little known songs. I actually beat you guys on this one!

President Blue refers to a very old comedy album. In the early 1960s, a Boston stand-up comic named Vaughn Meader began doing a routine impersonating President Kennedy’s very distinctive Harvard accent. In 1962 he joined with a bunch of writers, and they created a comedy album, The First Family. It was an overnight sensation and sold over 7 million copies. It was an absolutely hilarious parody of the Kennedy family and administration. In one segment, ‘Jackie’ is giving a tour of the White House, and said, “This is the Blue Room. We've tried to keep it just the way President Blue left it originally.” My parents (nowhere near as nutty as Carl’s!) owned a copy. As a child, I listened to it many, many times, and memorized huge parts. One favorite spot was when the neighbor’s kids came over to play, and when being told that Caroline wasn’t home, asked, “Can Lyndon come out to play?” Is it any wonder I ended up a hard-core political junkie? I think we can take it for granted that more than a few people who work at the White House (like the Secret Service agents who were laughing) would know about the album.

On a tragic note, JFK was killed a little over a year later. Suddenly you couldn’t give the album away, and Vaughn Meader was out of a job. He was totally typecast and never really had a good job afterwards. He sank into depression and alcoholism and drugs, before reinventing himself as a very small-time country music singer in Maine. He died in 2004.

Several people commented that American aircraft carriers can’t go anywhere near Pakistan because the Pakistanis are a nuclear power. How come a smart guy like Carl doesn’t know that? Well, the fact of the matter is that we don’t care and have never particularly cared. We have had more than a few disagreements with them over the years, but we have never backed down because of Pakistani nukes. We routinely maneuver carriers in the northern Arabian Sea. So a few things to remember: 1) The Pakistani’s true enemy, at least in their minds, is India, not us. 2) Yes, they have missiles; no, they don’t have targeting systems capable of hitting maneuvering American ships out at sea. 3) The Pakistani military runs the country, not the other way around. They have a very realistic expectation of what would happen in a non-land engagement with American forces.

The indoor White House swimming pool was covered over by Nixon, and the room was converted to the Press Briefing Room. A few years later Ford had an outside pool built. As for the indoor pool, it is still there, and empty, and the deep end is under the podium. BTW – Johnson really did go skinny-dipping in the indoor pool.

Not a whole lot to blog about. Everybody seemed to enjoy the direction I took the story.

The Al Sharpton episode was suggested by a reader, and I thought it was delicious and hilarious – and probably quite accurate. Mister Sharpton has a flagrant disregard for the facts if they get in the way of his narrative. I remember the Tawana Brawley case quite well.

A surprising number of questions have been raised as to Presidential succession. Several readers have argued that Carl is not allowed to name a new VP. Let’s set the record straight! Presidential succession deals with two specific pieces of legislation. The Presidential Succession Act of 1947, passed after the death of FDR, outlines who becomes the President, and in what order. If the President dies, the VP gets the job. If both die, it’s the Speaker of the House. If all three are gone, we go to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. After that you go to the Cabinet, in the order of seniority of the department: State, Treasury, Defense, etc. That’s the sort of thing that happens only in thrillers about Washington being destroyed.

However, if the VP slot is empty, which has happened several times, the 25th Amendment applies. Section 2 states that the President will nominate a candidate and then both houses of Congress vote on him/her. This has happened twice since then, when Nixon named Ford, and then when Ford named Rockefeller. Several people stated that Ford got the job because he was the Speaker of the House. That is incorrect. Ford was the House Minority Leader; the Speaker was Carl Albert, a Democrat.

One of the more controversial aspects of 9-11 was the Able Danger issue. There really was a DIA program called Able Danger, relatively new, that used data mining techniques to try and identify terrorists. In 1999 this was a very new idea. It came to light in 2005 and the DIA ordered it shut down and the records destroyed and the operators to refuse to testify. Supposedly the program identified some possible terrorist names, though it never determined what actions they were going to commit. I am not a conspiracy theorist! This was a real program with a real Congressional investigation. It never went anywhere, and without any records, it was a dead end. However, if Carl were to learn about it, I think his actions would be as I’ve described.

Bonus points if you recognize who President Blue was.

Several people wanted me to delay Carl being sworn in as President. In one case, if Carl delays long enough, he can run for reelection twice. Mind you, a constitutional argument could be made that his term of office began when he became the Acting President, but I’m not a lawyer. In another case, the argument was that the end of the week was too soon for people to accept. My response is that nature abhors a vacuum. For right or wrong, leaving Carl as the Acting President denies him legitimacy, and makes him into a caretaker. Somebody else, probably from Congress or the Cabinet, is going to move to seek political power at his expense. No, he needs to nip that in the bud immediately.

Several readers pointed out that in real life FBI Director Freeh had been gone for a few months, and that Mueller was in at the FBI by a week or two. That doesn’t work out so well for me firing people off. Therefore, we are holding onto Freeh for a few months longer, and that got written into the story.

The reader who reminded me of Asimov’s Foundation made me curious, so I spent a couple of nights rereading my well-worn copy. The reader attributed the quote (“Never let your sense of morals stand in the way of doing what's right.”) to the character Hober Mallow, but that didn’t seem right to me. It was actually said by the character Salvor Hardin, who had other pithy comments credited to him. Others which might prove helpful to Carl would be: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”, “An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.”, and “It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.”

So much to write about with these chapters!

Much of what occurred in the NSC meeting is factually accurate. Leaked minutes of the NSC meetings reveal that an Iraq invasion was being contemplated as early as February of 2001, long before 9-11 happened. Additionally, Paul O’Neill was horrified by what was happening with the budget, and after making some public remarks about the effects of the tax cuts, was forced to resign in 2002.

In the beginning of 137 I mention that the intel was being gamed in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. Again, this has been proven to be true, in multiple instances. The CIA was providing intelligence that matched what Bush and his handlers wanted, not what was true. The Valerie Plame Affair was simply the most egregious example.

Am I being too rough on the Secret Service? I don’t think so. By every report from neutral observers and reporters, there is a level of institutional arrogance and conceit that is astonishing to behold. George Will once reported on the ABC Sunday morning show that Bush once came to his home for a dinner party. Before he arrived, however, an advance team of agents scoured his neighborhood and ordered, on pain of arrest, everybody to leave their yards and go inside their homes and close the drapes! I can’t make this shit up! In another case, a writer said she had left a book as a personal gift in a protectee’s mailbox, and then was gang-tackled afterwards as a terrorist.

A number of people have written that Carl is being much too hard on Bush. George was actually really smart but managed to surround himself with a bunch of evil geniuses who led him to the dark side. He had a lousy ability to figure out who he should listen to, etc. If that helps you sleep at night, fine by me. I am going to lose a bunch of readers with this chapter anyway. On a personal note, no, I am not a Democrat! I think Obama has been a lousy President. I also think more than a few of the Republican challengers would have been even worse. Why anybody would actually want the job is beyond me in any case!

I have had a number of people wonder how Carl was going to become President or otherwise take the reins of power. I told you it would be a dark place, but some of you just didn’t listen. On the plus side, you won’t have to read any more rants about Bush! There’s a positive side to everything.

Could the ‘football’ ever be forgotten like that? Yes! It has happened several times, in fact.

To those who thought Carl couldn’t be that ruthless or cold, that has been his history from almost the first chapter! In school, when he got in fights, he didn’t just beat up the bullies, he crippled and maimed them! Some of those injuries I described would leave people with lifelong damage. After Lieutenant Numbnuts told the narcos in Nicaragua they were Americans, Carl murdered them, and there is no getting around that. Likewise, rather than let his brother go, Carl murdered him as well. Carl doesn’t leave an enemy upright and has no compunctions about it. As Asimov wrote in Foundation, “Never let your sense of morals stand in the way of doing what's right.”