The Squires of Surveillance
By Maureen Dowd
Dick and Rummy are holed up in the den of Rummy’s Chesapeake Bay retreat, Mount Misery, pawing through sheafs of transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations, hunting for inside dope.
Chinook helicopters patrol the skies above the red-brick waterfront mansion. Rummy loves the take-no-prisoners lineage of his $1.5 million getaway, built in the 19th century by Edward Covey, an evil slave owner.
Winter weekends by a crackling fire are cozy and conspiratorial, now that the two men have nearby spreads in St. Michaels, Md.
These squires of surveillance while away their evenings sipping from goblets of Glenlivet and perusing the illegally bugged phone conversations of any American they please. Getting in the holiday spirit, they’re mining data to revise their naughty and nice lists.
“Check this one out, Dick,” Rummy says excitedly. “I’ve been reading Jennifer Aniston’s conversations for the last six months now, and I gotta say, I don’t get what she sees in this guy Vince Vaughn. ‘Wedding Crashers’ was funny. They shot that here in this village, you know. But I don’t trust the guy. No way he’s going to give up lap dancers and be true. I just don’t want to see Jen get hurt again.”
Dick grunts. He’s deeply absorbed in the classified reports on the F.B.I. infiltration of a Vegan Community Project and a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protest against llama fur. He’s ruminating over a naked picture of Pamela Anderson emblazoned with the PETA slogan, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur.”
“Porter Goss tells me that Pam was shacking up with Mark McGrath - you know, he used to be with that band, Sugar Ray?” Rummy says. “Listen, Dick, we need to jawbone about this flapdoodle about our stateside spying operation that developed while you were on your whirlwind tour of American torture chambers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Dick interrupts, “More torture.”
“Some pansies are making unwarranted claims that we should have gotten warrants,” Rummy continues. “But we can’t worry about the Constitution’s fine print during war.
Read the whole thing..
Maureen Dowd Cheney Rumsfeld Snoopgate Eavesdropping PETA Dowd Bush
