After today, guess I won’t have too much to say, write, or dredge up from the past about the Bush Administration, huh? Well, so, here’s my final comment on the subject (I think). In 2007 I wrote — not very well, really — a satirical wanna-be about Condi Rice’s kind of revolting double-speak when she quibbled with Chuck Hagel over whether 22,000 additional troops constituted an escalation … duh. Her response (you can catch it here in this transcript) was Bush-wackiness at its best, um, worst. So, I wrote a column making fun of poor Condi which went over like, um, two big lead balloons.

And, this, my friends (oh, dear, sounding a bit McCain-esque!) may be my last word on Bushworld.dum.

————————————-
Asset augmentation

Candi, a well-known secretary, is a smart gal, but she works for a real featherweight of a boss. Sometimes I think she feels sorry for him and hopes her brain-power will rub off on him; other times, I think it’s an ego thing – working for a major dufus so she can feel superior.

Anyway, Candi … (Yes, that’s how she spells her name. Story goes, she changed it from Candy to Candi a few years back at the behest of her boss because, as he supposedly told her with a big grin, “Yours is not to reason Y, yours is but to do as I” …. Apparently, there’s no “we” in megalomaniac.)

As I was saying … Candi with an i has been working for this very big bigwig for over seven years, and she’s passionately devoted to him. Even though her boss isn’t well-liked, Candi stands staunchly by her man. He’s always sending her out to get his dirty laundry cleaned and making her sit in on meetings he’s too busy to attend, but she still quotes the party line like she’s his little wind-up doll.

Kind of gets on my nerves.

I don’t know Candi personally, though, and she certainly seems to take her job very seriously. But when it comes to her boss, she seems foolishly, even oddly, attached to him. I’m not suggesting she’s having an affair with him, just that she seems too weirdly willing to play puppet to his puppet-meister mien.

Recently, though, something happened that made me realize that Candi has gone from an over-zealous gal Friday to a just-this-side-of-sinister Stepford secretary.

I hadn’t seen much of her lately, but I’d heard a lot of scuttlebutt that Candi had pulled a major Pam Anderson.

Yep, rumor had it that Candi had seriously upped the amplitude of her, um, assets. Supposedly, she’d gone to some overseas doctor who was willing to plump her profile up to nearly bursting — with about 21,500 cc’s of saline in her implants — a dangerously high level that carries significant risk.

A surge in physical assets like can often attract the wrong kind of attention – people tend to feel threatened by such sudden inflation. Not to mention the collateral damage for Candi and anyone else in close proximity if one day those babies blow.

And worse, word on the street was that her boss had put her up to it; that he had even diverted shareholder funds to pay for the foreign handiwork.

I had put most of that down to idle gossip, but then just the other day, I happened to catch sight of Candi. (How could I not? Two over-inflated zeppelins, only slightly rounder, had heralded her arrival well before the rest of her walked in the room. I don’t know if sheer tonnage had displaced the air in the room or if all the men had simultaneously inhaled every last molecule of oxygen as they dropped their jaws, but either way, suddenly, it was quite hard to catch your breath.)

So there she was chatting it up with Chuckie, a colleague of hers, and as desperate as I was to run outside and get some fresh air, I couldn’t resist listening in ….

“Candi, honey,” Chuckie exclaimed, “You got a boob job!”

“What?!” Candi harrumphed, “I most certainly did not; I would never even consider such a thing”

“Are you saying,” Chuckie ventured, “that going from a B cup to pair of double zeps does not constitute a ‘boob job?’”

“Well, I think, Chuckie, that a ‘boob job’, as you so crassly describe it, is not just a matter of cup size or how many cc’s of saline you inject into an area.”

“Okay Candi, sweetie, if it’s not a ‘boob job’” Chuckie asked, “then what would you call it?”

A slight pause, and then I heard Candi smoothly reply, “I would call it, Chuckie, an . . . augmentation.”

Oh, right, now I get it. All the gossip-mongers had it wrong. Candi didn’t reinforce a strategic part of her anatomy with something as old-fashioned as a “boob job.” No, she just had a little new-age “augmentation.”

And, somewhere along the line, a teeny, tiny lobotomy as well.