SHOTGUN DICK AND THE HOLE IN THE HEAD GANG: CONFESSIONS OF AN INSIDER

The following is an account of the Bush the Younger Administration from a member of the Vice President's staff. He wishes to remain anonymous. And alive.

Shotgun Dick couldn't get elected to dog catcher and he knows it. Doesn't bother him even a little bit since he runs the Hole in the Head Gang with an iron fist and makes all the decisions and nobody argues with him. And who could blame us gang members? You never know when he's going to point his shotgun your way and besides, Shotgun Dick is making us all rich and that's the whole point of being in a gang of thieves and murderers. Sure, he lets Fredo, a.k.a. Bush The Younger, be the president, it takes the heat off the rest of the gang.

Shotgun Dick used to take his cue from the late Mafia boss of all bosses Carlo Gambino, that quietest of dons. Old Carlo was no publicity hound like John Gotti, instead wielding absolute power from the shadows. He never spent any significant time in jail and lived to be a very rich, very old man who died in his bed at home in Brooklyn. He knew what business he was in and figured low-key is best. Why shove it up the public's ass that he was a murdering thief? Why let the grandchildren read in the paper what a piece of shit Poppy is?

Well Shotgun Dick got tired of Fredo hogging all the credit and sort of forgot the lessons of the late Mr.Gambino. The public disciplining of a lower-echelon gang member with a shotgun blast to the face and chest was just one example that he's losing his grip. He has also given angry interviews defending his actions and decisions as boss of all bosses. Now Congress has introduced Articles of Impeachment against him for all the lies and corruption a younger Shotgun Dick would have been more careful to cover up or at least lay the blame on someone else. He's running out of guys like Scooter Libby to take the rap for him and I'm sure not going down for his sneering old ass.

Some of the gang are worried that all the hardware he had installed in him is starting to drive him even more nuts. The blackest heart in the business had taken a beating and he's more machine than man these days. The inside joke in the Hole in The Head Gang is "Who knew the son of a bitch even had a heart?" Of course we keep our jokes out of earshot of old Dick, who's still pretty nimble with his shotgun. But there's some grumbling in the ranks, the thinking being that they've got to prepare for when the gang is out of the White House in 2008 and Shotgun Dick's eye needs to on the ball to prepare the gang's transition back to private life.

A lot of the underbosses weren't happy with the whole government takeover gambit in the first pace, thinking they were doing just fine ripping off the public from the private sector. While they can't complain about their bank balances since the huge bonanza of the Iraqi war and the looting of the Treasury, a lot of the dons are uncomfortable being in the public spotlight. Rummy bailed and so did Ashcroft once everybody realized they didn't know what the hell they were doing. Powell grew a conscious and quit all of a sudden and now that Rice broad is actually trying to act like she's got some power, flying all over the world meeting with government officials like some real Secretary of State. Her job was supposed to be keeping Fredo in line and now his new handlers are letting the "President" say even more stupid bullshit than normal.

There's also been talk in the gang that stealing that second election in 2004 was a big mistake. Everybody knew we stole the first one but were willing to let bygones be bygones if we went away after 4 years. That was the original plan, take over the government for a term, see what we can steal and be gone before the country knew what hit them. The perfect caper, get in, get out, and we all walk away rich as King Midas while somebody serious gets to be president to fix what we broke. The only problem was that it worked so well Shotgun Dick got greedy and more than a little power mad. So the next election was rigged and Dick figured we can keep up the scam for four more years.

The only thing is, a bunch of goons and thugs like us are not presidents and cabinet secretaries and can keep up that facade for only so long. Any run-of-the-mill con man can tell you that half the battle is knowing when to get out. You get too greedy and the game is up. There's too many things that can go wrong that even the best world-class scammer can't control. Who could have figured on Hurricane Katrina wiping out New Orleans and a good chunk of the Gulf Coast? And now the country is looking at us to rebuild the joint when we couldn't give a rat's ass about all those poor suckers in their friggin' rowboats. It's not like we were legit or anything. What'd they expect?

I could have told them Brownie didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He was appointed to the FEMA job to keep him out of the way, figuring what harm could that dimwit do over there? Well, everybody knows by now how that worked out. Not that I care, it's just that it brought a lot of heat on the gang, people were expecting us to act like a real government, That's when a lot of us really started to get nervous. We figured that 9/11 thing was a godsend, exactly the kind of huge distraction we needed to do whatever the hell we wanted. People were so afraid we could have passed a law forcing loyal Americans to wear USA baseball caps if we wanted to, that's how good of a thing that was for us. Not so good for the people who got killed, but like I say, we just don't care about that crap.

We're only here to steal money and kill whoever gets in our way. That's why we didn't do so much in Afghanistan. If there's a poorer country out there I don't want to know about it, never mind trying to make money there. Now Iraq, there was a prize, practically gift-wrapped, complete with a real rootin-tootin' bad guy dictator and sitting on top of a sea of oil. That was Shotgun Dick's finest hour, getting Fredo all worked up about it and sending Powell over to the UN with some phony documents and they swallowed it. Some of the "reconnaissance" he used to prove the case were drawings for crying out loud! Talk abut your weapons of mass deception. So before you know it we send in the army, who thinks they're doing something good and noble, that's the beauty of it, and they destroy Iraq's army in a couple of weeks.

Of course the Army is too honorable to do everything we needed done so we hired some mercenaries too, guys who right away broke all the oil meters on their pipelines and port facilities so we could pump out all the oil we wanted to and nobody could prove anything. Talk about your pot of gold! And all this time we keep raising the price of oil even though we're stealing so much of it. So a few thousand of our soldiers got killed, so what? Isn't being a soldier supposed to be dangerous? Why do you think none of us ever joined the service? Last I checked, they carry guns and fight other guys with guns, right? So that's only to be expected. When we kill somebody, it's usually two behind the ear when they least expect it, or a phony car accident. It took a while for the country to figure out that the whole thing was a scam, and this is the time we should have bailed out and lost he '04 election.

But no, Shotgun Dick got all wrapped up in that whole shadow president crap and rigged up Ohio and New Mexico and some other places with phony voting machines and had us stay in power another four years. Big mistake in my opinion. Four years is really pushing the envelope of a scam as far as convincing the marks that we know what we're doing, but eight years? Forget about it. So at that point Shotgun Dick figures screw it, we'll just be blatant about it and push our weight around as if we were the real government. What a joke! All I can say is that this country's been pretty lucky that no other Katrina or 9/11 came along during our time here in Washington. There are still a lot of people so dumb that they'd look to us to help them, and then we'd be obliged to steal some more from them and call it help. That's what we do.

So maybe it's best that we get out while the getting's good. As for myself, I'd like to enjoy my billion bucks and not have to fork over any of it to defense lawyers. Truth be told, I'd have been happy to get out in '04 with only half a billion. Shotgun Dick tells me that's the thinking of a small timer and a lousy half a bil wouldn't last more than ten generations, tops. He also let everybody know that whoever wasn't on board with the second election could say hello to Mr. Shotgun so that was that. The only guys allowed to leave were those with enough money and power in the gang to defy Shotgun Dick or those who had become too much of a liability. That's another thing, in the old days before we took office, anybody who became a liability had an "accident" or simply disappeared. Now, being so much in the public eye, the only ones you can kill off are the small fish who get out of line, the guys who nobody knows. I kind of miss that.

So now that our time is getting short here, a lot of us are getting our accounts in order, hiding a lot of dough all over the world and making sure we have proper security in all our homes. I've got five pretty swanky houses myself and have my own private army to guard me, so that billion and change I swiped isn't really all that much when you consider my expenses. And does anyone think that private jets fuel themselves? I'm thinking maybe I have to siphon off a few more hundred mil from Iraq before I'm out of here. Fredo's more than ready to get out from under, that's for sure. All he hears lately is what a friggin' retard he is, and even though it's true that's got to bother a guy. The idiot can't put two coherent sentences together anymore, which is really no surprise since that's always been about his limit of cogent thought.

He's the guy I feel most sorry for because he thinks he's really been a president all this time. No one has the heart to tell the clown that real presidents don't take their orders from their vice president. His little nest egg of 4 or 5 billion is being handled by his wife since he'd only blow it on amusement parks and cowboy outfits. As for Shotgun Dick, I don't know what his plans are and don't really care. I'm hoping he drops dead sooner rather than later in case he has anything else crazy in mind, like the idea he was toying with the other day of staying for four more years as McCain's Vice President. And if McCain loses, old Dick was trying to figure out a way to create another national emergency so he could void the election results and continue the Bush The Younger administration for another four years. If that happens, my palace in Costa Rica is looking better and better. Enough is enough, even for thieves and murderers like The Hole in the Head Gang. As much fun as it's been, all things must pass. And America, do yourselves a favor in November: Think before you pull that lever.