Burning Up

The Assistant Deputy Administrator for Anti-Fecklessness was spending another Saturday afternoon at the State Department, but he couldn't get any work done because his girlfriend kept emailing him. Eva Brown had just seen a propaganda video in her international law class at American University Law School, and he could not convince her to let it go. So what if soldiers had used white phosphorus in Fallujah?! It's not a banned chemical weapon, and there was no proof that the Americans had targeted civilians. Sometimes Eva could be a real idiot. So gullible!

Up in Tenleytown, Eva was in tears. She could not believe that she was telling her boyfriend about watching a video of women and children burning to death, and he kept telling her she was wrong. Did he think the BBC staged it all with special effects? Eva had been a staunch supporter of the War on Terror when she lived in Mississippi, but she was starting to have her doubts. Maybe he was right? Maybe she was being manipulated. He was the smartest, most ambitious guy she had ever dated. Maybe she needed to try harder to get along with him. He worked at the State Department and surely knew a lot of stuff she didn't know.

What she didn't know he didn't know was that Condoleezza Rice was on her way back to the State Department, ready to implement her new China-buddy system for dealing with North Korea...and it didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working.

Over in the abandoned watchman's quarters at the drawbridge, Dubious McGinty was sorting through some greasy newspaper stories on North Korea, and he was burning up. Damn it all to hell! Korea, Vietnam--what the hell did they fight all those wars for? Vietnam veterans and American businessmen were now crawling all over Southeast Asia making nice-nice, making money. South Koreans were holding prayer vigils, waiting for North Korea to nuke them into oblivion. Now which of those wars did the U.S. lose? Dubious hurled the newspapers into the Potomac for Ardua to eat. He couldn't fix that stuff until he got rid of Ardua. She was the one making all these Washington politicians insane morons.

Over at the White House, Clio the butler was trying to relax with her twins. Reggie and Fergie were giggling and talking their secret twin language as they dipped the shredded North Korea newspaper articles into the flour paste and prepared to add another layer to their papier-mache Halloween witch. Clio was burning up with fever again, but trying not to show it to the twins. Sometimes she wondered what they were saying about her...and everything else.