And Now for Something Completely Different

The Rose Mary Stretch

We might as well at least get a little humor out of these crazy time.  So, let us go backward in time to an earlier and more innocent era.  Watergate, say.  Famously when White House tapes were subpoenaed, one of them turned out to have an 18 1/2 minute gap.  Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, insisted that she had accidentally erased erased it.  When asked how, she said she accidentally hit record instead of play and had her foot on the play pedal when the phone rang and she reached for it and -- well assumed the position represented above.  And held it for five minutes (not 18 1/2 as I had previously believed; she disclaimed all knowledge of 13 of those minutes).  This led to jokes about the "Rose Mary Stretch" and that she missed her calling as a secretary -- she should have been a contortionist.  Closer investigation determined that the tape had multiple erasures.

All of this came to mind when Jared Kusher submitted his security clearance form indicating no foreign contacts.  And then had to correct it multiple times, ending up with over 100 such contacts.  One can plead faulty memory to a foreign contact or two when the total is extensive, but to have over 100 contacts and forget every single one shows a degree of mental insufficiency that is clearly disqualifying to begin with.  So instead he claimed that some nameless staffer prematurely hit the send button before he had completed the application.  This did not call for so elaborate an act of contortionism as the Rose Mary Stretch, but was otherwise about equally plausible.  There are two ways to submit the application.  One can either print it out, sign it and submit it, or one can do it electronically.  Electronic submission is much like any electronic submission these days.  It requires the applicant to complete each screen successively and then requires the applicant to review and certify before submitting.  It seemed to me that there had to be some sort of joke in there that the unnamed staffer was actually the ghost of Rose Mary Woods (now deceased).

The Steve Bannon Stretch

But then White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci gave his now-infamous rant in which he accused Steve Bannon of, let us just say, an act of contortionism that even Rose Mary Woods might have found challenging (if she had had the equipment for it).

So between Rose Mary Woods' accidental contortionist erasure of the tapes, Jared Kushner's equally implausible accident in sending his security clearance before it was complete, and Steve Bannon's alleged contortionist talents, there has to be some sort of joke to be made.  I just can't figure out what it is.