The Night Before the Storm - A DC Fantasia:
Karl Rove has named his leather slave's asshole "Katrina" because once he starts to work on it, he's going to permanently wreck it. After tonight, Rove has said he might name the leather slave's mouth "Rita." Karl Rove keeps his leather slave in the basement of the White House right next to a pile of William Henry Harrison's bloody phlegm-stiffened handkerchiefs and a box of empty bottles of Dwight Eisenhower's special bald pate sheen made from the rendered fat of Stalin's purge victims. Karl Rove's leather slave is worried about his master, who's been popping Viagra like Altoids before a breathalyzer test in order to get hard enough to enter the leather slave's asshole without lubrication.

Like the twin hurricanes, Rove is feeling the crushing tides of two scandals slamming into him. "Goddamnit, how many fuckin' pills does it take to get this cock hard?" Rove screams at his demi-erect phallus. Karl Rove's leather slave would like to reach out to his master, tell him not to worry, that the presidential pardon is always in the offing if Abramoff drags him down or if he's indicted for the Plame fiasco; yes, the leather slave would like to hold Rove and whisper these things to him, but, alas, he is a leather slave, and his arms are tied in front of him and a ball gag is in his mouth, and, frankly, it's hard to think about sympathy when a sweaty, heavily-breathing Karl Rove is trying to jack himself off while shoving a ten-inch twisted dildo into the heart of Katrina, with Rove saying, "Yeah, bitch, I'm not leavin' here until the job is done."

Elsewhere, President Bush is passed out on the floor of the bathroom just across from the Lincoln bedroom, a stream of vomit drying on his half-buttoned shirt and his pantsless crotch, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels clutched tightly, like a baby's bottle, in his hand. A little while ago, he pledged to stop drinking if Laura would suck his dick, even after he had puked, but he had mistakenly called his wife "Bianca," and she stomped out. Now he's dreaming of floating corpses in an ethereal flood, except he's at the bottom of the murky water and the stinking, bloated, half-eaten bodies are drifting above him. At some point, a familiar corpse floats into his line of vision. It's Jesus. And Bush watches as giant alligators feed on the exposed insides of his savior, fattening themselves to immobility from the feast. It doesn't even occur to him, down there in the mud, to honor the Lord by chasing the gators away. It doesn't even occur to him to swim up. Instead, he prefers it down here, in the sewage-ridden floodwaters, all alone, watching without needing to do a thing, not even breathe. The bliss of isolation and inaction.

In a little while, he'll be picked up, cleaned off, and taken to Colorado, where he'll watch giant screens show him Rita nailing Louisiana and his "home" state. And he'll keep moving, from disaster zone to disaster zone, because if he keeps moving, it creates the illusion of decisiveness, but it also creates the image that everywhere he goes is a disaster zone. Better to stay here for now, whether it's in the warm flood waters or on the cool tile, here is better than there.

All around the District of Columbia and its suburbs, there's a degraded peace. Even at the home of future Chief Justice John Roberts, where, to thank God for the vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the judge is scourging himself. He kneels, nude, in the basement, whipping himself bloody to banish the thoughts of being the meat in a Patrick Leahy/Russ Feingold sandwich, his fantasy being the two senators, greasing him up, saying, "You're the only thing that stands between Vermont and Wisconsin," before the two protean "liberals" try to conquer him. Maybe if he adopts another child, he thinks, his wife won't have time for all those Feminists for Life interns she brings home. But, still and all, there's whippings of thanks and whippings for sins to be taken care of.

Over at Sam Brownback's residence, he's plying the 14-year old girl with Down's syndrome he brought to the Roberts' vote with wine coolers, declaring his love to her and how he loves all the children, and, before taking her dress off, coos over and over how he's gonna make her happy she wasn't aborted. Over at Bill Frist's home, the Majority Leader is nervously feeling his fingers twitch, a sense memory of surgeries that he gets whenever he's under pressure, and, certainly, with a potential SEC investigation of his possible insider trading, he's as jittery as a rabbit on an electric floor, jonesing to grab a canvas bag and haunt the streets and alleys of DC in a mad search for stray cats on which he can relieve his stress. Strangely, Tom DeLay sleeps soundly, some evil so complete that it has no worry about conscience or consequence.

And back in the White House, staring in the mirror of her vanity, Laura Bush dabs the last of the vomit from the corners of her mouth, wanting so desperately to be sad and angry, wanting to feel something for the destruction that's been done and the destruction that's going to be revealed by the morning light. But instead, all she can do, like so many Americans, is reach for that bottle of pills - which ones tonight? Xanax? Ambien? Vicodin? - down a couple and stare at the swirling colors of the storm in its abstract art form on the TV until it hypnotizes her into a doped-out half-sleep that she calls rest.