Satire by Mike Weland
“We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on – and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”
“Well, why don’t you fix it?”
“Well maybe I will! I’ll ‘Make Our Facilities Great Again!’ MOFGA! Sweet! We’ll have red hats by the billions and billions! They’ll worship me like you can’t believe it!”
“So, dear, you’ll hire a plumber?”
“For what? What’s there to know? Crap flows downhill! Hire a plumber? Ha! I don’t think so, I’ll fix America’s plumbing, and I’ll make the plumber’s unions pay for it!”
“Get serious … hire a plumber.”
“Hah!”
Night falls, faucets drip. Around the borough, husbands, uncles, sons, grampaws and nephews sleep fitfully. The rooster cracks crowing at the dawn and on local TV and newspapers a flushed little man shouts, “the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water!”
And as one, just over half of the wakening agree, “I know him, he talks my language and he knows what he’s talking about! Our facilities are a disgrace! And the plumber’s unions are going to pay for it! MOFGA!”
Ere long, U.S. flags flap patriotically in tall pickups nation-wide, red hats mark the faithful.
“He’s wonderful,” they sigh in swooning and well coordinated adoration. “He’s putting our constitutionals first!”
“He has his feces assembled!”
“Huh?”
“He has his sh*t together.”
“Oh, yeah, what she said!”
And the plumbers’ union releases ads of assurance that plumbing works, but they aren’t heard, for they are liberal and woke, promoting abominations such as the bidet to weaken the strong, upend the conservative.
“Okay, rocket surgeon,” a Fox News host asks a plumbing union leader there to protect the trade, “how can a terlet work if it’s not plugged in?”
“Gravity.”
“HA, Hahahaaaahehg heh hhhh … hack! Gravity is just a theory!”
And so, even as the flows of a nation’s effluent trickled and ebbed and rushed down into holes and out to sea precisely as it’s flowed for more than a century, just as plumbers know it ought … the people are hopelessly divided. The mostly gullible half had grown wise … plumbers aren’t the highly skilled tradesmen we thought they were, they are manipulators pretending to know the arcane mysteries only so they could charge real Americans exorbitant rates. Nobody elected them … What gave them the right to tell me how to run MY bathroom?
And it came to pass that the little man was elected to lead our nation and make the nation’s sanitary facilities great again … so that when you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, the water rushes out. You turn on the faucet and you get water. You take a shower and water comes out. Where people are flushing toilets once, as opposed to 10 times, 15 times.
But lo … for four years stymied by the wokeness of the liberals, the meddling of the lamestream media and the Department of Sanitation, interference from the Democrats and the oppression of the powerful plumber’s lobby, assured by the smart men and generals of his cabinet, who always told him “no, sir, this isn’t how it’s done,” nothing was getting done, no matter how our hero told them we were winning.
And night after night, sleepless, he’d sit awake in the Oval Office loo, flushing reams of official presidential documents, torn one by one into long, heartbroken strips and dropped singly into the bone porcelain bowl, just as he had the unrequited love letters he wrote to himself so long ago in a New York military academy, his dark thoughts on vengeance, on retribution. On why in the hell he had to flush ten or 15 times instead of once.
But he had no answers.
And so his nation’s lavatories, never actually broken, were never fixed, and he … our stool tsar savior … fell ignobly in the next election, victim of one of the most pernishiest election frogs ever perpeturtrated on a s*itting presidink.
A reasonable man would have stood down and been grateful for the respite, but our stool tsar savior was not a reasonable man. For four long years, he was held away from “his” office and left to wallow alone in the dessert of Mara-A-Lago, from whence he lay blame and cast false aspersions on the sleepy man who beat him for not doing anything about his wholly contrived crapper crisis and instead addressed real issues such as infrastructure.
And somehow he convinced the gullible who would hear that they suffered because he, our stool tsar savior, had been oppressed by the liberals, lied about by the “lamestream” media, held back at every turn by the Democrats.
And in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the massses believed, and so they voted. And a great pride fell over the land. Flags flown upside down turned once again erect and the elated MOFGA myriads gloated and resumed being overtly condescending to everyone who wasn’t them.
And this time, the stool tsar savior knew what he’d done wrong in the past, listening to the few competent experts and generals rather than those in his administration upon whose ears his words fell like the commandments they were. After he’d pardoned them, of course.
Lesson learned, he nominated the loyalists, the least qualified and most controversial cast of colorful characters since The Apprentice. He questioned them rigorously, hundreds of tough questions, all about him. And only those who answered “yes” to each one was considered, only those who could prove it through their public statements were hired.
He appointed the head of the Federal Ball & Flapper Bureau and named a group of czars he dubbed his Toilet Bowl Ring, hired a Pitcock Cabal and a Feral Faucet Committee to answer the old, old question, “what the hell are all these parts on a faucet?!”
He tasked the committee to go back to the first ever faucet, the feral faucet, and to look very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on – and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water.” To figure out the parts and reduce it to two.
He thumbed through the 2024 Plumber’s Bible.
“Would you look at this?” he exclaimed, “vents! They want vents! Water goes down, not up … get rid of ’em!”
“Yes, sir!”
He picked up a random tome from a massive table sagging under the weight of United States plumbing codes.
“Idaho, 412 pages,” he said. “Does Idaho even have plumbing? I heard they’re like bears … they go outside. Cut it to 15 pages, max!”
“Yassuh, boss!”
“You know what I hate, boss?” asked Elon Musk, one of the leaders of the boss’s newly formed Department of Plumbing Efficiency, (DOPE). “I hate when the plumbing goes ‘kerblooey’ and you go to the plumbing emporium and tell the owner and CEO your plumbing went kerblooey and he gives you bags of parts and you go home ready to ply that purple and orange stuff or whatever, and you have all these, these parts and they look nothing like your parts, so you pull off your parts and go back and show them and they say, “Oh! Well why didn’t you say it was a left thread hex-flange with inset o-ring left chamber filler putty?! That really simplifies thinks, but you’ll need a 3/8th torque-head filter hammer to set the taps and a half-inch large-thread flange wrench to really tighten her down else you flush and it just rushes off to sea and nothing you can do about it. And I say ‘you’re sure this is it?’ and he’s sure, but you wind up coming back 20 times over three days! And it happens every time!”
“You’ve been to the plumbing place about as often as I’ve pumped my own gas … like NEVER, Elon!” and they both laugh and laugh but agree, there’s too many parts, let alone tools. Ten parts and three tools should be plenty.
Musk nods, Vivek Ramaswamy smiles around a cracker topped high with chutney. Marjorie Taylor Greene, appointed DOPE House subcommittee chair, smiled vacuously and whispered a pointed aside to House Oversight Committee Chair and bringer of common sense leadership to the House James Comer, “but if I’m chair, Jim, where am I supposed to sit?”
And this intrepid team went to work diligently on the planning to cut parts, pare tools, charge the plumbers’ union, save trillions, deliver copious amounts of water instead of rush off to sea, flush up to a quarter ream with each pull and to be ready to launch immediately, with great pomp and fanfare, on Day 1.
And January 20 rolled around right on time, the presidink gathered his DOPEs again. “Are we ready?” he asked and MTG began bouncing frenziedly up and down in Comer’s lap, where she’d taken to sitting. “I know this one, Mr. Presidink,” she shouted, arms waving wildly as she bounced. “I know this one! Pick me! Oh Mr. Presidink! Please pick me!!!”
Comer groaned loudly and his head lolled as the presidink pointed to Marjorie.
“Yes, sir!” she yelled with great exuberance, smiling vacuously and wiggling her behind. Comer twitched once, twice, and began to snore. The presidink patted MTG on the head, having heard the only answer he’d countenance in his second term.
And thus assured, he strode out before the Fox and OAN cameras, jaw set, steely eyes locked firmly on his personal chief justice. He lay his right hand on the leather bound Plumber’s Bible purportedly used by Thomas Crapper, the most famous of all the world’s plumbers and inspirational personage of DOPE, whose valveless water waste preventer had “one movable part only.” He swore at the oath of his artifice, promised to uphold and defend his morning constitutional and then, to the roar of the largest inaugural crowd ever since his first, he introduced his DOPEs and regurgitated his mantra once again, a sea of red hats waving joyously and chanting “Make Our Facilities Great Again!’ MOFGA!”
“We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on – and in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water,” he shouted. “You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. Just dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once … but starting right now, we’re doing the biggliest enema you or plumbing ever saw … nothing ever like it in the world, ever … but we’re doing it … it’s happening right now!’
And so they were. Across the nation plumbers were being rounded up and delivered to holding hotels to be held out of the way as their “handiwork” was torn out and replaced, simplified and reduced to its essence. At the same time, delivery trucks were stopping at every home and business from coast-to-coast, dropping off at each a chamber pot and a portable commode.
Teams of U.S. Forest Service personnel went to work in every major city, digging holes in parks and public lawns and installing the state-of-the-art outhouses so widely beloved in our national forests.
As water systems were shut down, all the nation’s military service members, many jet-lagged from flights in from overseas duty and recalled from leave, were trucked in four man teams to every home, farm and business … to every structure that had a pipe, sink, faucet or crapper, and, armed with the new 20-page U.S. Consolidated Plumbing Code, stacks of pipe in two sizes, bags of ells, 45s, couplings and wyes, one-size/style fits all sinks, commodes, basins and drains, two hammers, a pipe wrench and a hacksaw, began ripping out the old, ostentatious plumbing and replacing it all as prescribed by the 900-plus page Project 2025 Presidential Plumbing Transition Project written in secret by the Heritage Department of Redundancy Department of which our new Presidink knew nothing.
In a massive feat of logistical genius, truck load after truck load of old pipe and fixtures were ripped out of houses old and new as happy families watched from a safe distance and hauled to landfills and dumps and roadside ditches while fresh new plumbing was loaded at airports, railway stations and docks and trucked in like clockwork. As if by magic, freshly dug trenches appeared as water lines were readied for connection to water mains, wells or cisterns, sewer pipes ready to be coupled to sewage mains or septic tanks.
Families could be back in a modest single-family homes within days, those who lived in major apartment complexes within a few short weeks, using their brand-new bedside commode and/or chamber pot as they happily repaired the walls and cabinetry torn out to reach the plumbing while waiting for each home on a system to be completed so service could be restored.
And every day the presidink assembled his DOPEs for the latest poop, and every report was glowing. People had never been happier or more grateful to a president who so obviously gave a sh*t. Oh, of course you had your libs in every community, most of them related to plumbers, who complained that the workmanship was shoddy, the new code flawed, they were sick of using chamber pots without being able to use the dishwasher to clean them.
What do you tell them, James? Comer, gaunt and grayish in pallor looked out from under MTG’s arm and said simply, “Depends,” which brought a sudden vacuous smile to her face and she began clapping and bouncing. “Good answer!!” she giggled.
And thus assured, the presidink went before the Fox and OAN cameras and told America what a great job he was doing, how far work had progressed and how happy were the millions of people who now had new and simple plumbing that worked.
“It’s amazing, like nothing nobody’s ever seen … did I tell you I’m a builder? And rich? Nobody believed me, but I know a lot about plumbing … better than the plumbers!”
“Excuse me sir? Sir?” the young ambitious Fox reporter asked. “Sir, there’s no question but that you’re doing a phenomenal job…”
“Rupert? This your kid? I like this kid! Keep him around — he might just take over my press corpse, I like him so much! Go ahead, kid.”
Well, sir, it’s August, your own statisticians say 35-percent of the nation’s non-commercial properties have had plumbing removed but only two percent of households have the new plumbing installed and of those, none works.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody but Marjorie Taylor Greene, sir.” Hearing her name spoken, Marjorie snapped immediately erect, her vacuous smile looking freshly plastered, firm and pleasantly moist. Comer groaned, twitched twice and passed out.
As paramedics worked to pry MTG from Comer’s cold, dead lap, the presidink waggled a finger and a gang of Oath Keepers standing back and standing by snapped to attention with the precision and alacrity of a two-day-on-the-dash pickle loaf sandwich with too much mayo. They fell upon the hapless Rupert Murdoch and his intrepid young reporter and dragged them away to languish with all the other lamestream media, allowing the angry crowd to kick them, to rend their garments, and to spit upon them … to call them up before their God as blasphemers for their insolence and effrontery of him who sacrificed so much, who endured so much, who gave so much, who proclaimed so much … and they were sorely smoted them with sticks and stones and wet squirrels.
And those who did the angry smoting believed in their prayerful righteousness, for God stood silent and did not tell them to stop.
And unheard by the masses, millions of active duty skeeter-wing Army and Marine privates, Navy seamen, Air Force airmen, Coast Guard seamen recruits and Space Force cadets, as well as their reserve and National Guard counterparts, did their best to convince hundreds of generals, “Sir/Ma’am, with all due respect, you can go hug a dirty, wet plumber’s snake, sir/ma’am … this sh*t ain’t working.”
And the generals so told the commander-in-chief in his private office and all were fired and consigned to enlisted quarters with no privacy as the presidink, lying, sat privately and angrily scratched his corporals, wondering how so many could let him down so badly. Marjorie Taylor Greene lied in the corner, looking deflated.
“Hey, Mister?” a small voice said as he stood on the south lawn, scanning the southern sky for the northern lights.
“Hey, Mister,” this time with a small hand tugging a fold in his pants.
“What?” he asked testily, liftfing his welders goggles and looking down to see a disheveled girl, dirty, maybe four years old.
“Is there any woods around here? I gotta poop.”
“You’re in the nation’s capitol, young lady, just off the Oval Office with the Presedink of the United States. My private facility is right there and it works. Go ahead.”
“No sir, I’d rather not. Is there any woods?”
“You know there’s bears in the woods?”
“Yessir.”
“And you’d rather go in the woods way out there than right here in the office of the Presidink of the United States?”
“Yessir.”
“But that’s silly … why?”
“I’m from Idaho, mister … and I’d rather trust the bear.”
— END —