Fugit! Fugit! Fugit!

"How can you eject me from the Russia Caucus on Veteran's Day?!" cried California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, stomping his feet from the cold and frustration.  "It's an insult to patriots!"

"You're no veteran!" retorted Texas Congressman Zeke "Slick" Hicks, blocking Rohrabacher from entering his front door.

"Nobody's done more for veterans than I have!" declared Rohrabacher.  "I don't even take my flag pin off in the shower!"

"Now you're telling me you have nipple piercings?!" exclaimed Hicks.  "I should've known better than to get mixed up with a bunch of California wackos!"

"What?!  Did you toss Devin Nunes out of the Russia Caucus, too?"

"Of course I did!  I don't know what Robert Mueller has on you, and I don't want to know!"

"He's got nothing!  And I'm not going down alone!"

"Listen, you little turd blossom!" muttered Hicks, grabbing Rohrabacher by the scarf around his neck and dragging him inside as a woman ran by with a jogging stroller.  "Don't you make threats at me!  I've still got the Exxon boys on my side!  If I were you, I'd cash out my chips now and move to Moscow!  Devin's thinkin' 'bout the Azores, but he's a friggin' moron if he thinks he'll escape extradition there."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this!" cried Rohrabacher.  "After all we've been through together!  Speaker Ryan's gonna hear about this, you turncoat!"

"He's the one that told me to toss you both out of the Russia Caucus, you nitwit!  Things are gettin' too hot!  We need to pass billionaire tax cuts for our billionaire donors!  Now I suggest you use the rest of your Veteran's Day doing photo-ops at the World War II Memorial, and if somebody asks you about Trump's comments that he believes Vladimir Putin is telling the truth and our military intelligence officers are a bunch of political hacks, tell 'em you stand by our American patriots!"  And with that, Hicks opened his front door again and pushed Rep. Dana Rohrabacher back out onto the front porch.

"Excellent," said the Russian ambassador, emerging from the dining room around the corner.  "Now let's get back down to business, Congressman."

Several miles away, CIA Director Mike Pompeo was taking his fiftieth phone call of the day to defend the Intelligence Community's assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 Election.  He had the statement down cold:  a brief factual assertion with no mention of Donald Trump's treasonous remarks in Southeast Asia.  The problem was, as each call ticked by, he was scratching away another layer of skin underneath his diabolically Cursed Rolex.  Finally, the skin broke, and his blood flowed out into contact with the Cursed Rolex.  He slammed down the phone and jumped up from his desk, shouting out something in Latin.

"Sir?!" cried his assistant, running into Pompeo's office.

"Fugit!  Fugit!  Fugit!" exclaimed the CIA Director, jumping up onto his desk and ripping open his shirt and jacket to bare his chest like a gorilla.  "Mortifer!  Mortifer!  Mortifer!"  He was now jumping up and down wildly.

The assistant, a retired Army Ranger, dove at his boss head-first while simultaneously pushing Pompeo's legs out from under him.  The CIA Director went tumbling head-first toward the carpeting, somersaulted across the floor, and was about to get back up when his assistant quickly pinned him in a headlock to force Pompeo to pass out.

"Malum...malum...malum," the CIA Director gasped weakly before blacking out.

The assistant exhaled deeply, rolled Pompeo over onto his back, then looked up as two CIA officers rushed in after hearing the commotion.

"Did he slash his wrist?!" cried one of them.

The assistant looked down at the little dribble of blood smeared under the Rolex, then back up at them.  "Something like that," he said, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket to press on the cut.

"Typical," said the other, shaking his head and turning to leave.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, militiaman and conspiracy blogger Glenn Michael Beckmann was driving down Pennsylvania Avenue towards Trump International Hotel in an elaborately modified backhoe.  About a year had passed since he had narrowly escaped going to trial for criminal trespass charges relating to his drone's dumping pig manure on the hotel.  Since then, a lot of people on the Internet had eclipsed his own vehement conspiracy theories about how the hotel was a den of harlots and thieves financed by Saudi petro dollars and Russian bitcoin, but nobody had eclipsed his willingness to fight the Orange Menace head-on.  "Now, I know you've practiced quite a lot at trapeze school, but you've only got one shot at this," he said, turning to glance at Brittani, who was wearing double-layered Lycra body suits and a black ski mask.

"I can do it!" declared Brittani, who was still not quite sixteen.  She fist-bumped Beckmann and started climbing up the backhoe as he slowed down at the approach to the Old Post Office Pavilion bell tower.  "I'm ready!" she cried, and he stopped the truck altogether and climbed out of the truck to watch as Brittani started swinging back and forth to build up momentum and height.  A security guard was now coming out of the hotel but was rendered speechless at the sight.  Brittani swung higher and higher until she was ready to make the arc all the way into the bell tower.

"Hey!" shouted the security guard, more entranced by the operation than outraged.

Brittani had unfurled a banner with giant letters spelling out #MeToo during her final arc, then landed a bit roughly but safely inside the tower--where a small group of tourists momentarily forgot how cold and windy it was up there and started clapping and taking pictures.  She smiled shyly at the crowd.  "Here, help me unroll this!"

"What on Earth?!" asked the tour guide, trying to suppress a smile as several people helped Brittani without even knowing what the next banner was going to say.  With some effort, they unfurled it and hung it outside the tower:  it was a list of names pertaining to women who had complained about sexual harassment from Donald Trump.

Down on the street, Glenn Michael Beckmann was trying really hard not to want to have sex with Brittani (who already had an annulment from her disastrous under-age marriage in Virginia).  "Damn, this is hard!" he muttered under his breath.

"Man, that is cool!" somebody exclaimed, patting Beckmann on the back.

"He's a puppet king installed by alien overloads to weaken human civilization before they invade Earth," Beckmann said, handing the woman his business card.

"Um, okay," she said, moving along.

Meanwhile, inside Trump International Hotel, Washington Post "Metro" reporter Perry Winkle was drinking at the bar, discreetly taking notes on all the bankers, hedge fund managers, tax shelter lobbyists, and billionaires walking in and out of the lobby, before and after their forays upstairs to the Tax Bill suite--where they were getting hammered on Trump Wine and grudgingly hammering out tweaks to appease recalcitrant Republicans who kept saying they could not possibly vote for a bill that would explode the federal deficit so that the super rich could get tax cuts while 98% of their constituents received no benefit or actually ended up worse off!

"Hey, handsome," said his girlfriend, attorney Coretta Rosa McIntyre, sitting down beside him.  "Did you get it?"

"Yep, already uploaded to WaPo website."  He turned to give her a kiss.  "You have more spies up there than you told me!"

"Some of them were last-minute recruits on the cleaning staff.  Is this who I think it is?" she asked, pulling up a cellphone photo.

"Hm," replied Perry.  "It looks like Stephen Miller with a wig and mustache."

"That's what I thought!  He was trying to get into a suite at the other end of that hall, and this guy speaking Russian barked something at him through the chain, then slammed the door in his face."

"You're telling me there's a Russian gatekeeper up there!?  Damn!  Nobody even told me!"

Coretta shook her head, sympathetically.  "They have enough reporters chasing the Russia thing:  you've gotta help me stop this horrific tax plan!"

"John McCain just slammed Trump for favoring a KGB colonel over the U.S. Intelligence Community," he said.

"And will probably vote for tax cuts, anyway--in a tax plan that will hurt veterans.  Focus!"

"I understand, really!" protested Perry.  "The 'pro-life' politicians will end adoption tax credits, and the 'fiscal hawks' will pretend trickle-down is a real thing, and it's all a bunch of total bullshit and craven corruption, but man I wish I could be the one reporting on Michael Flynn's going to prison!"

"Would you also want to be the one explaining seven hours of Carter Page testimony one Tweet at a time?  'Cause that's the downside of working that beat!"

Back at Langley, CIA Director Mike Pompeo was buttoned up again, with some fresh gauze wrapped around the wrist under the Cursed Rolex--which he had immediately put back on after regaining consciousness, despite his assistant's warning that it might feel heavy on the cut skin.  The Director refused to take any more phone calls about Trump's comments on Russia and was hoping for something fun to work on, like North Korea, when one of the CIA's top Middle East spies entered his office.  "Finally!" Pompeo exclaimed.  "Tell me what the Hell is going on in Saudi Arabia!"

"It all started with Donald Trump and the glowing orb...."

"This sounds good!" whispered the Cursed Rolex.

Ghosts don't shiver from the cold, but the ghost of Henry Samuelson shuddered as he floated over Ardua of the Potomac and returned to his old McLean stomping grounds just in time to hear the part in the story where Jared Kushner smiles nervously while the Saudis ply him with cash and make jokes about the Jews.

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COMING UP:    Coming home!