Dana Perino as Nurse Ratched

Ol' Chief Broom, they call me. I sweep along in demerol-abbreviated flicks across the gleaming dayroom floor. The Acutes and The Chronics are all in their TV places as Nurse Ratched scolds the Washington Press Corps.

MS. RATCHED: Good afternoon. One statement on Burma and another statement on a domestic issue, and then we can go to questions.

Blah, blah, blah...

With that, I'll take your questions.

Q I wanted to ask about the President's statement this morning on the interrogation method. He said -- he repeated, obviously, what he did yesterday (sic), that the government doesn't torture -- the U.S. government doesn't torture people. But these memos make it sound like the definition of what's permissible is so expansive that you could say we don't torture and almost anything could be true falling into that. (???) What do you say to that?

MS. RATCHED: Well, what I say is the United States' policy and our laws is (sic) not to torture. We meet the laws and we also meet our international obligations. There's a public document that interprets the statute that is from the Office of Legal Opinion (sic), from the Justice Department. It's on the website for anybody to read. Any additional documents are classified for a reason, because they have to deal (sic) with interrogation techniques. (???)

What the President said today is, yes, we do interrogate al Qaeda terrorists (suspects). These are people who (allegedly) intend to harm us. We do not torture them. And the appropriate members of the Congress were briefed, and there ‘has been no changes' (sic...Jesus) from that December 2004 opinion that everyone has available to them -- in addition to the briefings that the Hill has had.

Q Any of the briefing -- any of the members of Congress who have been briefed, are those the same ones who are complaining (sic) about the --

MS. RATCHED: Intelligence Committee members were briefed.

Q And so they're saying -- one of their complaints obviously is that these memos were done in secret, they're secret memos. So you're saying that's not true because they've been briefed?

MS. RATCHED: Well, they have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress on the Intelligence Committee. But they are classified for a reason and they are secret -- I think the word "secret" is getting a little bit too much -- it takes on the aura of mystery (???) -- but one of the reasons they are secret is because they ‘need to be'. They need to be cloaked in the classified system so that we can keep that information private so that we're not signaling to our enemies exactly what our techniques are. (???) And that's why they're -- they've been classified, and that's why they were briefed to the intelligence community, because it's an intelligence community program.

And then the head nurse deftly segues into blatant lies about imaginary briefings. You can only listen to Republicans lie in brief spurts, for soon, meds or no meds, your synapses simply refuse to fire. Or you start listening in fragments because it's so shocking to reason that while you're contemplating insane declarations about acceptable levels of torture, two or three more go past in sketchy, dry-brushed broom strokes.

Yeah, the briefing room is exactly the same as the dayroom. There's Cheswick from NBC, Harding from CBS, Martini from AP but there's no McMurphy; not a McMurphy in the bunch, which brings me to how I got here. I was taking a break from working on a news satire weblog one day and, snapping on the TV, settled into a spectacle of this very same Nurse Ratched espousing doctrine so antithetical to rational thought that I dialed through to the Washington Press Ward and said "If somebody doesn't choke that bitch to death right now I'm coming down there and I'm going..."

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