ShareThisWASHINGTON - A major concern of most wire service editors in the old days was a bad taste practical joke story that inadvertently found its way into circulation and ended up in dozens of newspapers in too much a rush to verify it. Young reporters were told repeatedly to keep their humor to themselves and away from the filing system at the risk of permanent damage to their careers.
With the advent of the Internet as a major source of information all bets are off and as a result it has become the repository of some of the worst and most tasteless political humor and misinformation imaginable. Without the vetting process of normal journalism made up material now appears regularly and is passed along to millions who believe it is Gospel, recycling it to millions more until the fiction ultimately prevails with little chance of the truth catching up.
Now and then, however, a spoof comes along that is obviously just that and is so funny that it deserves some attention largely because it puts into perspective the roots of a growing disenchantment with government and the burgeoning national debt. In this case it is the Tea Party movement that has just completed its first national convention with a rousing keynote address by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the charismatic (to a growing number of people) 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate in case you have just returned from outer space.
In the format of the New York Times and attributed to the Associated Press a story written in perfect wire service journalese alleges that "Congress has voted to outsource the presidency of the United States of America to India on March 1, 2011.
"The move is being made in order to save the president's $500,000 annual salary and also a record $750 billion in deficit expenditures and related overhead that his office has incurred in the last three months."
"It is estimated," the story continues "that $7 trillion can be saved to the end of the president's term." Pictured in separate positions in the black -bordered -piece are Barack Obama and his alleged Indian replacement, "Gurvinder Singh."
Although the piece is so slick as to look authentic, anyone who has ever had a civics course or studied social studies or, in fact, has attended school to the sixth grade level understands immediately that this a satirical undertaking if for no other reason than that the Congress has no power to do what it claims. Well, lets hope they do.
What the story does is represent the sentiments of those who believe that the cost of government has become so outrageous that without some drastic action, it will ultimately bring down the Republic, and part of that result is the continued erosion of American jobs through outsourcing. That is the one theme to which everyone who has joined the Tea Party "revolution," if it can be called that, subscribes despite all its varied beliefs and political diversity. It is a movement in an embryonic state without a true leader or, in many cases, even desirous of having one.
Palin, a frequent object of liberal derisiveness, is smart enough to understand this and dodged any question about a potential presidential bid, stating to a sellout crowd that this is not a movement from the top down but from the bottom up. She called the national debt "a generational theft" and said that "many of us have had enough." She also made points by announcing to the group that she would donate the $100,000 she received for the address to the movement.
It would be a mistake for the White House and Democrats generally to treat lightly this mainly conservative, libertarian backlash to current policies or to consider Palin as ineffectual, one who believes the ability to see Russia from her home state validates her foreign policy expertise. That goes for Republicans, too, who clearly have benefited from congressional inroads caused by the Tea Party crowd, many of whom are independent voters.
Outsourcing the presidency is a hilarious, if silly theme, but the very idea of it makes a major point as have other satirical political treatises from Gulliver's Travels to the essays of Charles Lamb.
(E-mail Dan K. Thomasson, former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service, at thomassondan(at)aol.com.)
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