A Stupak Spin, Maybe?

Dear Representative Stupak:

As CEO of the Institute for Modifying All Government Entities (known by its acronym IMAGE), I am writing to offer you our services in light of the furor resulting from your flip-flop on the Senate healthcare bill, which you and those dedicated to you as their leader could have kept from passing the House.

In preparation for a possible affirmative response, I’m suggesting that you attend a Washington seminar later this week featuring an IMAGE department outlining the course titled Stratagems for Effecting Loyalty and Loot and Offsetting Unaccountability Tactics, or SELLOUT, for short. Your 180-degree change from being pro-life to being pro-abortion would have been tolerable to most democrats if you just hadn’t accepted that $726,409 right before the vote ostensibly to update some small airports in your district.

You will need help now in regaining the loyalty of the “true-believers” while at the same time devising ways to slurp more from the public trough. SELLOUT can help with this as well as teach your staff how to convince voters that you are still accountable to the “true-believers” and will work hard to keep the president from signing another executive order to nullify the one he promised and delivered, not that it matters since an executive order is worthless paper when contrary to settled law. As a lawyer, you know this and probably erred in believing that the voters are too dumb to understand.

The IMAGE arm that can help you in preparing remarks before and after a foot-in-mouth disaster is the LEAGUE for INSCRUTABILIZING EGREGIOUSNESS, or LIE, by its acronym. Before the “gift” for your district, you insisted that the bill included money for abortions despite the Hyde Amendment that apparently disallowed same but after the vote, in an interview with CNN’s John King, agreed with Speaker Pelosi that the Hyde Amendment forestalled this all along. What did you think initially about the Hyde Amendment when you insisted that the bill killed it or that the executive order was necessary to uphold it, knowing full well that the executive order is worthless? See? You need help in first discovering the truth and then in how to explain it away, and that’s the business of LIE.

Politicians need to be all things to all people most if not all of the time. IMAGE has an arm for helping the legislator say the right thing at the right time in the right place. It’s called the Department for Excising, Correcting, or Extolling Inimitable Tripe, or DECEIT, for short.
Depending upon the group you’re addressing and assuming that most political speech is opportunistic propaganda, DECEIT will help you either deny something you’ve said, give it a new twist, or make it appear as a pronouncement from the Oracle at Delphi and worthy of canonization.

For instance, former president Clinton simply cleared up the “Monica mess” (excised it) by homing in (correcting the definition of non-sex) on the proper definition of the word is (an intellectual triumph worthy of genius classification). It also saved his skin from perjury. You need to distance yourself from the Speaker pronto, and DECEIT can help you do it, the first step being plausibly denying that you even know her, much less actually agreed with her.

After using DECEIT services to clear up misunderstandings (euphemism for outright idiocies), most politicians need to reactivate their bases of support with rousing language that appears to exhibit world-shaking wisdom but actually says nothing, the better not to be asked about it later and forgetting the proper position to take for a specific group. The IMAGE seminar (weeklong) for help with this subject is titled Patriotic Homilies for Orating Objurgations and Evangelical Yammering, well-known by campaign chairmen by its acronym PHOOEY.

John Kerry and John Edwards used PHOOEY extensively in 2004 since they spoke constantly in African-American churches and had to be fed pungent homilies or full-fledged sermons on a weekly basis as well as taught ebonics for some areas. Edwards also used PHOOEY rhetoric for his appearances in the backyards of New Orleans in 2007-08, although he was often distracted by…never mind. As a Roman Catholic democrat, you’re faced with the problem of being on the same side (or at least you were) as the evangelical Christians vis-à-vis abortion, the problem being that they’re mostly republicans. So, you need PHOOEY to help you devise ways to excoriate the evangelicals without disagreeing with them.

That’s a fine line, and that’s where PHOOEY can help. A pedestrian objurgation might be that the evangelicals are mean-spirited since many of them oppose healthcare and want people to just die off. You can’t say that, of course…too harsh. PHOOEY will coach you in the proper way to scandalize those Bible-thumpers. If before his campaign stop in Hollywood the president had consulted with IMAGE before heading into Pennsylvania after his claim to the beautiful people that the little people grasp their Bibles, load their shotguns and go looking for immigrants to waste, he wouldn’t have had to spend weeks cleaning up that misunderstanding (euphemism for mindlessness).

In any case, PHOOEY can make you sound off with the best of the fire-eating evangelicals in the hell-and-brimstone milieu. So, please consider taking advantage of all these services. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and observe total silence during the Easter recess.

Respectfully,
I.M. Otherself, CEO
IMAGE