To Compare Washing Dishes With Scrubbing the Constitution: Hubert Humdinger Blasts Obama

I am tired of hearing about President Obama’s preposterous press conference that was supposed to address America’s concerns over the NSA spying on everybody’s online usage and electronic information, but because I’m a fairly loyal friend, I read the entire transcript over again so as to fill in my friend and exiled cultural philosopher, Hubert Humdinger.

Humdinger, the stodgy old thinker who has retreated to the remote regions of Northern Europe, had been ready to watch the US president’s press conference on his computer, when unexpectedly he spilled his plate of pork’n beans onto the lap of his thin, worn trousers. In panic, Humdinger stood and swept the hot beans and juice off his lap, flinging bits of the savory sauce everywhere.

Rather than watching the president explain away the abuses of the NSA, Humdinger spent the evening cleaning the wall, the carpet, and his pants while cursing mildly under his breath. He asked me to fill him in with a few meaningful highlights. “I’d meant to watch the damn thing, because I needed a good belly laugh,” the always cynical Humdinger told me over our shaky Skype connection.

I told Humdinger one of my favorite moments of the press conference was this, when the president said:

So the fact is, is that Mr. Snowden’s been charged with three felonies. If in fact he believes that what he did was right, then, like every American citizen, he can come here, appear before the court with a lawyer and make his case.

Humdinger indeed suffered a deep belly laugh. A classic Ha ha ha! “If that young man comes skipping back to the United States of America,” he shouted at me, “he’ll be stripped to his underwear in a military brig, put on suicide watch to justify it, and thrown into a solitary confinement cell that’s as big as the tiny closet in which I keep my smoking jackets. Snowden will get one hour of shitty exercise walking figure eights around a small room. They’ll waterboard him at night. He’ll never see the sun again!”

Of course, as most in-tune people of this country know, Humdinger was referring to the torturous nearly two year solitary confinement of Bradley Manning, which came under the direct orders of the Obama administration.

Here’s another one worth a healthy chuckle, I told Humdinger. The president also said:

The question is how do we make the American people more comfortable? If I tell Michelle that I did the dishes — now, granted, in the White House, I don’t do the dishes that much, but back in the day — (laughter) — and — and she’s a little skeptical, well, I’d like her to trust me, but maybe I need to bring her back and show her the dishes and not just have her take my word for it.

Humdinger’s face, which had been hovering centimeters away from the webcam at the top of his computer, flew back. The old man nearly tipped over in his computer chair. And then a hoarse laugh erupted. I could only see the clean shaven skin beneath Humdinger’s chin. He seemed to be laughing at God.

“Dishes!” he finally said. “This guy’s a comedian. And what is America’s reaction? Sleep tight! The government will handle it! Obama might as well have started off his speech with the words of Alexander Hamilton who, addressing the lack of the common man’s interest in fighting the imperial British superpower at the time, said, ‘…our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep…. They are determined not to be free.’”

Humdinger wiped the tears out of his eyes and cleared his throat. “What a metaphor,” he said. “To compare washing dishes with scrubbing the Constitution.”

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