It's the economy, Jew Boy!

PART ONE.

Apparently McCain was not fucking around.

On Friday the locks to the Straight Talk Express were changed. I slept on my jacket in the nearby woods.

When I woke Saturday morning my watch was missing and when I arrived at the weekend press briefing a grease soaked white paper bag greeted me at my customary seat. The bag smelled delicious. The aroma was sweet and briny. Bacon. I stood in the back, arms folded tight across my chest. When McCain walked in he looked at the empty seat and then at me. He smiled. I gave him the finger. His smile slid off his face and his eyes narrowed.

Sunday passed without incident.

And then, on Monday morning, I was jostled awake by four gloved sets of hands wrenching me up from the forest floor. I struggled, swiveling my head in an attempt to identify my assailants. The men all wore black ski masks. They tossed me into the back of a van and slammed and locked the doors. They did not cover my head, but there were no windows for me to look out of anyway. Fifteen minutes later, I felt the van ease down a ramp and break. The temperature had dropped in the air, I could feel it through the van's rusty hinges. The doors opened again. I was in a parking lot, below ground. The same four men yanked me out of the car and slammed me against the side of the van. One of the masked men stepped forward, cocked his arm, and punched me in the face.

When I came to I was sitting in a leather Trillipsie meeting chair (I only knew this particular make because of its offensive lack of upper back support and swivel). The overhead lights were off and two halogen desk lamps illuminated the center of what I took to be an office. One faced me and one faced a decidedly more appealing chair. The rest of the room was cloaked in a half darkness that obscured but did not obliterate the room's owners stately office furniture. I was not tied to my chair, but two men (who I assumed to be two of the four who had picked me up earlier) stood on either side of the comfy-looking chair. They still wore masks and were much more deterring than any knot could have hoped to be. The three of us sat in silence for another twenty minutes.

A door behind me opened. A brown suit passed. The back of the head attached to the suit was topped with a thick mash of wavy, styled white hair. The head was wide, made even wider by two date-sized earlobes that plumped out on either side. The man was short but purposeful. The air around him smelled like moth balls and cologne, Calvin Klein I guessed. I should have listened to McCain, I should have taken his words at face value. This was too horrible to be true. It was him. It was Joe Lieberman.