We Are Not Making This Up

OK, we admit that sometimes we may take a few...er...liberties with the quotes we report to you. It's all in the sense of a higher degree of clarity though, as we attempt to brush aside the thicket of manners, rationality and clear thinking that surround the truth, get directly at the little brute and poke it with a stick. Think of it as a sort of cave man journalism (or woman if you prefer, but remember women didn't count for much back then...sort of like Phyllis Schafley today. )

Occasionally though, we run across a story that even our rum soaked editorial expertise can't improve upon. This is one of those stories.

Once the color barrier has been broken, minority contractors seeking government work may need to overcome the Bush barrier. That's the message U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson seemed to send during an April 28 talk in Dallas.

See, now you're thinking the above passage was brought to you courtesy of a twisted trip though the editorial facilities here at IM Central. Wrong. You see it as it is. But wait, there's more:

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

OK, now you're thinking that's gotta be the IM warp. Wrong again, we cut, we paste, you read. This guy is gonna make our job very easy. Unless of course he resigns.

Come on. This is just too good to be real. That statement had to violate about twenty federal regulations, not to mention state and local ordinances. The guy will probably be on his way to the unemployment office before we get home for dinner. Oh wait, Bush administration. Never mind.

Actually this worries us a little. When the random voices, psychotic ruminations, and bonkazoid utterances that have so far been trapped in the heads of those who lead us find their way into the public discourse, there will be no more need for blogs such as this one because craziness will be right there on the street for everyone to see, just like the grocery cart pushing person of indeterminate sex who tells all those who pass that he/she used to work for the CIA until being kidnapped by aliens on the way to a meeting of the Elf consortium.

And a sad day that will be esteemed readers, for it will mean we must pass from the scene, much as the dinosaurs, whom time abandoned to the dusty back shelves of history. Those mighty beasts whose roar once shook the very earth upon which they walked, now nothing but a child's attraction in a museum. Those mammoth twenty ton killing machines for whom the entire planet was a buffet, now reduced to a 99 cent squeaky toy bought to silence a toddler's whining. Oh, fate you are the cruel Captain of a cruel ship. What meteor of insanity streaks towards us even now? What will be the next idiocy, illegality, incomprehensibility uttered by our elected leaders and their sycophant patronage lackeys? Will it be enough? Will it be the end? John Bolton, call your office.