A youngish kid with long hair and a red t-shirt in this crowd started telling me his story, about how he’d been busted for possession of drug paraphernalia. “It was a couple of pipes…” he began.
I waved him off and explained that, as a member of the national campaign press, I was here to write about what I wanted him to say, not what he wanted himself to say. “Look,” I said, holding up a bill. “I’m willing to pay twenty bucks to the first person who’ll say whatever I want him to say about Fred Thompson.”
About ten sets of hands flew up, including the kid in front of me. I held up the twenty.
“Name,” I barked.
“Gary Blakeman,” he said.
“Age,” I said.
“Seventeen.”
I wrote that down. “Gary, does Fred Thompson look like a pedophile to you?”
He looked at me pleadingly. “Yes, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“Yes, he does,” he answered.
“So what you’re saying, Gary,” I prompted, “is that you wouldn’t be at all surprised to walk into a room and see this candidate’s penis in a four year-old child?”
“Of course not!” the kid said. “Because he looks like a fucking pedophile, dude!”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said. “And what kind of face would you expect him to be making at that moment?”
The kid grit his teeth and strained his neck muscles. “He’d be like, unnnnhh!” he shouted.
“Thanks,” I said, handing him the twenty. He took it and walked off with his hands over his head in triumph. I looked over at the wire-service girl, who was still humping an old couple about the Hillary thing. Amateur, I thought.
Just think -- by the time '08 is finally, blessedly in the can, two full years of our lives will have been taken up with this shit. I assume this means that the '12 stumping will start in June '09, if only to keep the punditocracy busy.
3 comments:
The kid works for the Washington Post and will be fired soon because Fred is so, you know, TALL.
Yeah, that Noron tall-guy shit just chafes.
Here's something odd -- in Taibbi's subsequent road report after the one I excerpted, he goes back to Council Bluffs a week later, after the campaigners have gone, to get a sense of the town itself. The homeless couple he had talked to, Dot and Jamie, tell him that that Blakeman kid is reported as a missing juvenile. Coincidence but still kinda weird.
Sad to say, maybe the next guy that waved 20 bucks at him was interested in more than a yuck.
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