News item: Under the threat of a veto by President Bush, Congress defeated an attempt to amend the Patriot Act. The amendment would have prohibited the government from investigating the reading habits of its citizens. Under the current law, the Department of Justice may obtain the names of books and videos that you borrow from public libraries.
Your columnist, in his never-ending search for truth and a weekly paycheck, has uncovered a classified report from the Justice Department on its investigation into the reading habits of the American public.
Secret Document
aka Hush, Hush!
We have determined there to be a direct relationship between reading books and acts of terrorism. Approximately 75 percent of terrorists are known to read at least one book every three months (for your information, we are counting pamphlets on homemade explosives as books in the nonfiction category).
Contrast this with the fact that 75 percent of patriotic Americans don’t read at all (this includes the President, whom we found not only doesn’t read a newspaper, but hasn’t read anything else either. Note: We are not counting Mr. Bush’s dog-eared copy of Cliff Notes of Romeo and Juliet, obviously from his days at Yale).
Having uncovered this diabolical relationship between reading and acts of terrorism, we came up with several corollary conclusions. There are no privately owned bookstores in South Philadelphia. Thereby we conclude that this area must be patriotic. Note that there are a few libraries in South Philadelphia, but because of funding cuts, the newest book on the shelf is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Although Hemingway supported the Spanish Civil War and was a well-known pinko sympathizer, no one has checked out the book in 22 years, so no threat is perceived.
We are focusing on people who tend to take out books written by Michael Moore or Al Franken, for obvious reasons that need not be stated here. Our agents also are taking aggressive action such as the following: Agent z109 removed the video Bowling for Columbine from its video case and replaced it with The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston (the irony was intentional).
We do have some preliminary conclusions to report. A surveillance of the beach in Wildwood revealed that 98 percent of those with books had copies of The Da Vinci Code (we are as yet unsure whether this "code" has anything to do with the urgent warning recently issued by the Department of Homeland Security).
Our agents have reported no sightings of the Koran on America’s beaches yet this summer, but we believe some of the copies of The Da Vinci Code may have false covers, so who knows what is inside.
We tracked that subversive columnist from the South Philadelphia Review to a Center City bookstore that sells used magazines. Our source tells us that he purchased a back issues of Time and Playboy. It is our belief that he used the purchase of a respectable news magazine as cover for his kinky taste in pornography. We also have observed this columnist with a copy of the Philadelphia Gay News in his grocery bag, so we are close to concluding that with his wide sexual preferences, this man is never without a date.
In defending the nation’s interests, we also have kept a close watch on the reading habits of the President’s own cabinet members. The Vice President was caught renting a copy of Anger Management from the local Blockbuster. Unfortunately, Mr. Cheney saw fit to confront our agent and is reported to have told him (and we are paraphrasing) to go sexually enjoy himself.
Donald Rumsfeld took out a copy of The Arrogance of Power by Sen. William Fulbright. We are happy to report that it appears he never read it. We are worried about Colin Powell. He has read more books than anyone else in the Bush Administration, which makes his loyalty immediately suspect, especially since many of them have the word "peace" in the title.
I have not been able to get any hard information on Condi Rice, except that one of our agents keeps insisting that she is really Anita Hill in disguise, which would be real cause for concern.
Thank goodness we never have to have concern about our boss, John Ashcroft. Our only complaint about Mr. Ashcroft is decidedly minor. He insists that one of our agents carry his karaoke machine for him whenever he attends a social event.
