Condoleezza Rice and the Antifa?

The Fairmont Hotel doorman offered to hail a taxi for Condoleezza Rice, but she decided to walk to the Heurich Society meeting in the Dupont Circle Brewmaster's Castle.  With sunglasses and combat boots on, she could walk almost anywhere without getting recognized--even DC, where she was once a National Security Adviser, then Secretary of State.  The weather was fine, and she liked the sound of her boots clomping on the sidewalk.  It had only taken a few months of the Trump Administration for her to go back to being just another black woman out on the streets.  At her Stanford University job she was still respected and admired, but out on the streets was a different matter.  She had experimented with different types of clothing, makeup, shoes, and bags, but they made no difference.:  nobody recognized her except as a black woman.  There were now Stanford shops she no longer went into because the clerks followed her too closely.  There were cafes she no longer entered because they were haunts of the neo-Nazis who stared at her in an ugly way she had not known since leaving Alabama all those years ago.  And she had been forced to use Lyft drivers when hailing taxis became unreliable.

Rice had phoned Trump after his Charlottesville remarks to urge him to make a forceful condemnation of Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and all white nationalists, but he had angrily told her that he already did.  She urged him not to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, that it would signal to unprincipled police officers everywhere that they could willfully target and do violence to people of color with no consequences, but he had retorted that Arpaio had only been doing what needed to be done to keep bad hombres out of Arizona.  Rice had then pleaded with Trump to appoint more diplomats to negotiate with North Korea, telling him that his escalating threats of retaliation were putting American troops, South Koreans, and Japanese citizens in grave danger, but he had angrily replied to her about how many more votes he had won than Bush, and that the globalist wing of the Republican Party was dead.

But none of that had unnerved her as much as the staged photo of him awkwardly lifting up and kissing a black girl.  The look on his face was the look of a boy forced to eat broccoli, and he looked eager to get it over with and drop her down again.  Then there was the gleeful smile of Melania, pretending she had married him because he did things like this.  And also what appeared to be the face of an apprehensive aide or local official holding his breath, waiting to see what Trump would do next:  like that episode of "The Simpsons" when political candidate "Mr. Burns" was being urged to eat the three-eyed fish because there was nothing wrong with eating fish from the lake next to his nuclear power plant, and Mr. Burns slowly lifted the forkful of vile flesh towards his mouth while a campaign adviser could be seen encouraging him to bite it, and in the end Mr. Burns did...then violently spit it out.

The ghost of Condoleezza Rice's late pet, Pippin, had already discovered her presence back in DC, and was frantically meowing and rubbing up against her, but Rice was oblivious to the spectral feline, absorbed in thoughts about Cville2DC and the end of DACA.  The United States had never hemorrhaged Soft Power so rapidly:  there was literally nothing the U.S. could now lecture other countries about, let alone inspire them on.

Now The Gopper Ghost and his spectral canine pack had discovered Rice was in town, and were crowding all around her as she made her way down M Street.  The hissing Ghost Pippin leaped up to sit on Rice's head as the Samoyed (Ghost Anatoly) started bark-whispering at Rice about the work he was doing with Ghost Henry to counter Russia's cyber war.  Odd thoughts started popping into Rice's head, and the grimace on her face caused a passerby to move over to the far edge of sidewalk.  I know that look, thought Rice:  I need to get away from that angry/crazy black woman.  Ghost Anatoly continued whispering to Rice about the Ghost CIA operations, their sporadic incursions into the Russian Embassy and chancery buildings, and their success in persuading Rex Tillerson to order several Russian consulates closed in retaliation for the expulsion of scores of American diplomats from Moscow.  Ghost Anatoly told her that Ghost Henry wanted to tap her KGB expertise to plan their next operation.

No, thought Rice, shaking her head, trying to clear out the odd thoughts bombarding her brain.  Focus on existential threat.  She had already been recruited to donate money to a secret Federal Reserve Board SuperPAC, and to sit on the board of a nonprofit trying to rescue Qatar from the Saudi-led blockade and boycott.  Career diplomats bailing out of the malfunctioning State Department had called her to complain about the tone-deafness of Rex Tillerson, while the increasingly Walter E. Kurtzian Assistant Deputy Administrator for Carnage had called her to ask how to crack the whip and get more work out of the remaining worker bees.

Ghost Anatoly nipped at her ankles, and she stumbled a bit, looking around in confusion.  Russia! Ghost Anatoly shouted at her.

"I know about Russia!" exclaimed Rice, and now more people were moving to the far side of the sidewalk as she passed them by.  She realized she was talking out loud and reined herself in.  Focus, discipline, existential threat, relatives in Alabama emailing her to say their voter registrations were cancelled and their churches vandalized with swastikas.

Finally, she was at the Brewmaster's Castle and walked up the stairs to the third floor conference where the Heurich Society members were chatting about the pennant race and waiting for her to dial in by video conferencing.

"Secretary Rice!" exclaimed Captain Tyler Glockmann.  "What a wonderful surprise!  We've had some promising developments this week at the Defense Intelligence Agency."

"That's nice," Rice said, sitting down without acknowledging the dropped jaws of most of the members--who had not seen her in person for quite a long time.  "I want you to stay on mission, Captain Glockmann, but I need to redirect some of our other resources to a new project, which I am calling Project Tuxedo."

"Is this about the Kennedy Center Honors?" asked the international investment banker.  "Trump isn't even going, so I'd rather not make my wife boycott them:  she loves Gloria Estefan."

Rice cast him a withering look.  "No, tuxedo, as in black and white, as in white alone is not a good look in this great country of ours."

"Uh-huh," nodded the banker, not liking where this was going.

"Couldn't agree more!" said the international arms merchant, who was also not comfortable with where this was going.

Rice looked over at a former FBI agent.  "I need you to hire some Antifa militia members in various states."

"Antifa?!" exclaimed the former FBI agent.  "They've just been labeled domestic terrorists!"  (Ghost Pippin jumped up to scratch his neck, and he reached back in surprise.)

"Which is why we need to professionalize their ranks, sharpen their focus, concentrate their efforts, keep law enforcement off of them, and make sure they have the right weapons to do what needs to be done in this country."

Now the jaws were dropping again, since many of the Heurich Society members knew how ruthless she had been during the invasion of Iraq and subsequent months of extracting (faulty) intelligence from tortured prisoners.  "What are you saying?" asked a former member of the CIA.

"I'm saying my greatest enemy is within.  If you don't agree with that, then you can vote in a new Chair for the Heurich Society.  I believe Dick Cheney is still available, and he certainly doesn't share my concerns."

Several members rushed to reassure her that she still had their confidence, and nobody wanted Cheney back.  "But are you sure about this?" asked the treasurer.  "It might just escalate the violence on many sides."

"Many sides?!" yelled Rice, jumping to her feet.

"That's not what I meant!" replied the treasurer.  "In many places!"

"I will do what needs to be done, with or without you!" Rice answered.  She used to be proud of rising to the top of organizations populated by white men, but it suddenly felt like a millstone around her neck.

"Absolutely!" said the former FBI agent.  "Hey, I hate those skinheads!  When I was a kid, they attacked my Jewish dentist.  Who the Hell attacks dentists?"

"Sure," said Rice, sarcastically, "do this for the Jewish people."

"And your people," he replied, more quietly.

"So, uh, I'm still working on Russia and intelligence gathering against Trump's crime network, and stuff like that, right?" interrupted Captain Glockmann (who was impersonating his deceased twin brother because Rice had personally appealed to him to be a patriot).

"Yes," Rice answered (causing Ghost Anatoly to exhale in relief), "you have enough difficulties with maintaining your cover at DIA.  Others can handle Project Tuxedo.  And anybody who's uncomfortable approaching the Antifa are welcome to go undercover in the Klan for intelligence-gathering.  Who's volunteering?"

Outside the window, a catbird flew off to report this unexpected development to Ardua of the Potomac, imitating the sound of a police siren as she flew through the air.

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COMING UP:       The diary of White House
security guard Randy "Bubba" Blaylock.