The leaders of the Republican Party were sleeping soundly in their bunker this morning when the sirens began.
“No,” Speaker of the House John Boehner muttered to himself, jolting up in bed. “No, it can’t be.”
Boehner threw on his bathrobe and ran out into the hallway, where a murmuring crowd had already formed around today’s copy of the New York Times.
“It’s a quote about Obamacare from Scott Rigell, one of our congressmen in Virginia,” Fox News chairman Roger Ailes announced. “Quiet down and let me read it!” The group fell silent.
“It’s not in dispute that many Americans’ lives are being disrupted in an important way by this law,” Ailes read aloud, quoting Rigell. “Is it also true that —”
Ailes paused mid-sentence, the blood draining from his face.
“Keep going. What does it say?” urged Eric Cantor.
Ailes took a deep breath, then continued. “Is it also true that some Americans’ lives have gotten better?” He looked up from the newspaper. “Yes.”
The group gasped.
“And to not acknowledge that is to deny reality.”
The sirens were still blaring, the emergency lights flashing. But for a few seconds, nobody said a word.
“We know what must be done,” Rush Limbaugh, who was somehow already smoking a cigar, said quietly as he looked around at his colleagues. “I hereby initiate … Contingency Plan G.”
