October 14, 2007
Remembering A Cereal Patriot
A dramatization
How quickly four years pass!
Oddly, I’m not seeing this day commemorated much around the internets, so I guess it falls to me to post the reminder.
On October 14, 2003, Arthur Mooge, patriot and McClownburger closing manager, snuck into the White House disguised as a bag of presidential fan mail.
He worried that our famously incurious president was doing irreparable harm to this country, it laws and traditions. That worry turned into despair when he thought that there was no way to get Bush to read a newspaper, never mind an editorial that criticised his approach to the presidency. But his despair blossomed into inspiration when he learned an important fact about the president’s reading habits.
Bush takes a seldom-reported reading break during breakfast as a mind-expanding exercise. He scrutinizes the puzzles and facts on the back of his breakfast cereal box, sometimes concentrating for minutes at a time on a particularly challenging definition or “find the differences” puzzle.
Mooge waited for the right moment and then pasted a copy of the United States Constitution to one of the president’s cereal boxes. His escape plan was thwarted, however, when he turned a corner and tripped over Dick Cheney napping in a hallway. In an unlucky turn, his patriotic prank had covered up a word search that the president had already spent two weeks on. Inside sources said that the president threw a considerable tantrum, but Scott McClellan told the nation “White House security is no laughing matter, but the president is a good sport.”
The White House security problem was solved by Bush’s dramatic loss of popularity, which resulted in presidential fan mail being carried in by the folder1 rather than by a man-sized canvas sack. The Secret Service is now dealing with an entirely separate security issue dealing with presidential complaint mail.
Here’s to you, Mooge! You were a true patriot. And, as Americans, our hearts go out to your family who are still mourning your shocking death on the job at McClownburger in what police are calling “a friendly fryer incident.” A promised investigation is still pending.
1 The majority of the president’s fan mail now comes from the nation’s fine psychiatric institutions. However, it is delivered through a slightly different screening process.
Posted by James at October 14, 2007 12:34 PM