Kirby Sterling Publishing

It wasn't long before Panetta and Jarrett made up and were working together again.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the way Washington rolls. You constantly have to move on… unless it's something important like missing WMDs in Iraq, income equality, Bush tax cuts, Bush firing of attorneys, Iran-Contra, Watergate, etc.
"We're starting to get phone calls from reporters," VJ said worryingly. "Carney wants to know what to say. What should we tell them?"She was referring to chief press secretary Jay Carney.
"We don't really know anything right now," Panetta responded shrugging his shoulders.
"I wish a Republican would shoot their mouth off so I could get the reporters to focus on them," Jarrett added. "Right now I'm just bouncing callers to Jay and Jay's bouncing them to me. I'm sure you're getting calls too."
"Probably, but they are the last of my concerns," was Panetta's explanation.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
"How could this have happened? Was there any warning?" Jarrett asked.
Panetta shook his head, "Not that I'm aware but we still haven't heard from State. Maybe they had something but if they did they didn't tell us."
They then both looked at me. Suddenly, I wished they were back to fighting each other.
"Was there any intel on this?" she asked in a tone that I thought was a bit too accusative.
"Uh, I hadn't been briefed on anything," I said. "I'm here with you guys most of the time."
I could tell by the looks on their faces that they didn't appreciate my attempt at humor.
"Um, hey, did NSA hear anything? What does Donilon say?" I quickly asked to divert attention.
"Tom!?!" VJ asked in a loud voice.
"Yes, ma'am," he responded to her other side. We all jumped.
"Jesus, don't do that!" VJ huffed.
"Sorry," he apologized.
"Tom, Valerie asks a good question…" Valerie asked him.
Did you see how she did that? She's a genius. It's always someone else. She just slides right through life effortlessly. "… was there any intel or chatter about this picked up by the NSA?" she finished her… er… my question.
"Well, Valerie," he began, looking at me, falling completely for VJ's diversion.
"As far as I know, we heard nothing though I will make inquiries. But, really, who could have predicted that al Qaeda would do anything on Sept. 11?" he asked.
I shrugged my shoulders in agreement. I certainly didn't want to stick out like a bump in the road.
"Al Qaeda? Who said anything about al Qaeda?" Jarrett fired back. "You heard the president. They're on the run…on the ropes… powerless… It's not al Qaeda. There will be no more talk of al Qaeda. So you're saying you have bupkus?"
"Er, yeah, uh, bupkus," Donilon agreed.
"Can I ask a dumb question?" I piped up. "What was Stevens doing in Benghazi? The embassy is in Tripoli."
"Don't you know?" Donilon retorted.
"If I knew I wouldn't ask," I smarted back. It's so hard to ask an innocent question with these people. It always invites some snarky smart-ass response. It's their way of gaining superiority and so often that's all Washington is about - on the personal, professional and government level - power over others.
"It's a secret," Jarrett said with her blank face.
"I'm the CIA Liaison, how can it be a secret?" I protested.
"Ask your bosses," she responded. "Perhaps you aren't cleared to know."

* * *

I was coming back from the ladies room, which is a whole 'nother story in itself, when The One and Tommy Vietor stumbled out of the Choom Room. The Choom Room was a cleaning closet that had been turned into a… uh… private sanctuary on the floor for the President to discuss top secret things in confidence. Yeah, that's how they explained it. It had become known unofficially as the "Choom Room."
Both were still smoldering.
"That's some stiff shit, Tommy Boy," The One croaked.
He called Vietor "Tommy Boy" and "The Aviator." The Aviator because Tommy provided The One with… uh… a way to fly without having to board Marine One or Air Force One. For his part, Tommy Boy called The One, "Dude," "Top Dude," "Mr. Dudident," "The Presidude," "Bam!," "Bamster" and a variety of other names like "Bama-a-Lama-Ding-Dong." The One had promoted Vietor from campaign van wagon driver up to White House press office and National Security Council staffer. He was extremely loyal and one of the few White House inner circle members who didn't have an Ivy League or elite college degree. But he obviously had other qualifications.
"Yeah, dude, it's the shizzle in Holly-town these days," Vietor responded. "It makes you mellower than yellow."
"Well, thanks, I'm stoked so maybe I can get on this shit that's monkeying my prep for Vegas," The One added.
Vietor, who said Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" was his mentor, explained, "The secret ingredient is cat pee."
Mr. President looked at him and his mouth and tongue began to move like he might be ready to spit something out.
"Nah, don't worry, they wash it and I had the EPA look into it. It's harmless," Vietor assured him. "Besides, isn't coffee made from cat poop all the rage with the espresso drinkers?"
"Oh, Michelle drinks that expensive stuff by the gallon. She even uses it to water that stupid garden she started," The One responded. "Have you ever seen a six-figure coffee bill?"
Tommy Boy shook his head.
"I have. We had to cut that out of the Defense Dept.'s ammo budget."
"Gotta have priorities," Vietor agreed.
Then they noticed me.
"What's the latest with Ben Gazzara-town?" Vietor blabbered. Normally such a half-ass question coming from someone would elicit a drubbing but with Tommy Boy, it was just the way things were.
"We're still gathering information at this point," I responded in classic, patented Washington-speak. You know, I could work in the press office.
"Okay," Vietor responded with an uncomfortably long stare at me.
"That's my cue to get back to the grind," The One hiccupped and began traveling down the hall back towards the Situation Room.

* * *

Finally, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called in.
Panetta put her on speakerphone. "Yes, Madam Secretary of State. I am here with the President and Valerie Jarrett and the national security staff. We are listening."
"The fucking Blackhawks are down!" she screamed.
The One's eyes lit up and he quickly shifted from his traditional feet on the table posture to sitting upright in his chair. The color hadn't fully returned to his face. Everyone around the table began looking at each other.
"What?" The SecDef said jumping up. "There can't be any helicopters there! Who ordered in any forces?" He looked at Gen. Dempsey.
"Not me. I haven't lifted a finger or moved jack squat to do anything. I promise," was the general's shocked response.
"Tell Bill not to send anymore troops to Mogadishu, they'll be slaughtered because they are just baby-faced kids drafted because they were too poor to go to college," Hillary screamed through the phone. "We need more college tuition money...!"
Panetta rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. The One slumped back in relief.
"She's drunk," mumbled Jarrett.
"Madam Secretary, what are you talking about?" Panetta slowly asked politely into the phone.
"Hudson was right! Game over, man! We know what happened to those guys…"
"And gals," someone piped up.
"… Game, set and match…"
The SecDef leaned towards the receiver near him, "Uh, is there a man we could speak to there?" he asked, displaying typical male sexism. It's not like the male Secretarys of State hadn't broken down in moments of crisis before; not that this was a crisis. I could so see John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Al Haig, George Schultz, Jim Baker and Colin Powell weeping like children or screaming at fictional people during crunch time.
"Hell, no LBJ, we won't go!" came a chant out of the little speaker. "We have to do it for the children!"
"Madam Secretary we've heard that you've lost touch with the ambassador. Is that true?" the Secretary of Defense tried once more to get the Secretary of State on track.
"We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!" came the response.
"Thank you for your input," Valerie Jarrett said to the phone before touching the button to turn it off.
"We need to get a hold of someone sober over there," VJ suggested. Panetta nodded.
"I'll see if I can reach Nuland or Sullivan," Tom Donilon said getting up and leaving the room. He actually walked out of the room instead of evaporating into a miasma.  
Panetta looked at Dempsey. "What are our options, General?"
"Well, looking at the clock and starting at zero, I can assemble a team of advisers representing all services along with select governmental office such as State, the EPA, OPM … and we'll need the input of other stakeholders such as the U.N. Oh, and our allies in the region. Can't forget them, 'Leading from behind, Mr. President.'" He nodded towards The One.
"I like the way you think, general. You'll go far in this administration," The One responded.
"Thank, you, sir. I'm grateful. All those tracks can be done over the next several hours. We can ascertain forces in the theater and consider ramp up times… and there are personnel considerations. It will take a few hours to put out recall orders, search the local brothels and jails, coordinating with day care facilities and school schedules and, of course, at any one time a quarter of our female soldiers and sailors are on medical leave or applying for it… Then there's logistical considerations such as gathering maps from the auto club, fueling up aircraft and ships…"
Panetta lost his patience and interrupted the general's workflow. "Can you give me a round number answer at this time?"
"Yes, sir. We could maybe get a plane to go take a look in 8-10 hours. We might be able to put boots on the ground in a day or, probably, two."
The Secretary of Defense stared at him and started to say something but The One beat him to it.
"Whoa, whoa, no one's talking about an invasion here. This country is tired of war… I campaigned against more of the same and I promised people I'd end the Iraq War and I did and I'm ending the Afghan War as well. I've been pulling back from our commitments across the globe. I'm darn well not going to create a new commitment."
"But, sir, you were one of the leaders of deposing Qaddafi," Secretary Panetta said. "There's a commitment level here."
"I was never for deposing Qadaffi," The One retorted. "That was the allies. I was behind them. Remember, 'Leading from behind,' as the general so aptly stated."
"Frankly, Mr. President, that's called following," Panetta retorted back.
"No, no, no, see that's the brilliance of it, I'm only leading where they are already going so it's not my fault," The One explained.
Panetta squinted at The One but didn't reply. Clearly, his limited education, topping out at a law degree from the Santa Clara University, was compromising his ability to understand the higher concepts of statecraft that The One practiced.
"Bush would have just invaded for the oil but not me. I let people make their own decisions. They decided to depose Qaddafi in the Arab Spring so who am I to contradict them?" The One looked around the table. Everyone was in awe. I know they all wanted to break out into a standing ovation but that would have been indecorious, considering the gravity of the situation.
The Secretary of Defense sat down shaking his head. He knew he was beaten.
Valerie Jarrett then spoke up, "So, General Dempsey, you're saying no one could get there in time to do anything?"
"Right-o," the general answered back using a military response for affirmative.
I gotta give credit to Panetta, he's a fighter. That's how he rose from a hardscrabble beginning as an oppressed minority in California and worked his way to important posts in The White House, the CIA and Congress. He refused to give up. "No one knows that. This could be just the beginning of a series of attacks. We need to get in touch with people there to find out what the hell is going on. We need to have forces ready to protect all the Americans in Benghazi and Libya. Who knows where this is going?"
"And we will, Mr. Secretary…" The One jumped in to comfort the clearly distressed secretary. "I'll have the FBI look into it in the morning, when the smoke starts clearing. Maybe by then State or the CIA or the NSA will have heard something… I'm sure CNN might have something too and when I read about this in the paper tomorrow I'll be mad as hell. But I don't know why you're so fixated on this. It's not your people."
Then The One turned to me. My heart fluttered as we made eye contact for a millisecond as he turned back to the Situation Table. "Val 007 here should be the one squawking, it's her people, the CIA-Americans, getting attacked and I'm sure Hillary is freaking out because it's her ambassador and her facility that're getting shot to pieces."
He said my name… He knew who I was... I was getting light-headed...

* * *

I encountered Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Valerie Jarrett exiting the Situation Room and stopping to talk just around the corner. I took this break in the action to finally study the portrait of John Tyler hanging nearby. Tyler was the 10th president and was the first to accede to the office by death of his predecessor, William Henry Harrison. He is considered a conservative crank and thus one of the lesser presidents.
"Where's the president?" the SecDef inquired.
"Doing what he does best," VJ told him.
"Doesn't he know that stuff is killing his brain cells?" Panetta implored.
"No, not that, raising money for the DNC," VJ corrected him.
"Oh," Panetta acknowledged. "What's the call to arms today?"
"Republicans at the behest of their corporate masters are poisoning the air so Obama for America needs money for its 'Instant Response to Republican Lies' campaign to counter their corporate lies," she enlightened him.
"Ah, a golden oldie… But didn't the president say last week at that fundraiser before the League of Wilderness Resources Foundation that his EPA had cleaned up the air from the soot-ridden smog of the Bush administration?" he asked.
"Yeah, so what's your point?" Jarrett shot back.  
"Oh, nothing…"
"It was not a fundraiser but a policy speech in which the attendees then spontaneously donated almost a million dollars to the DNC and its affiliates. Fundraising at such an event would have been illegal. The president's campaign never does anything illegal," Jarrett recited.
"I forgot," Panetta moaned.
"We have to keep the troops on point," Jarrett began. "You never know where or when the enemy might strike next. We must be prepared to risk it all, sacrifice for the cause. We must outlast the enemy because this is a long struggle with an implacable enemy… No less than the survival of our progressive civilization is at stake."
"Are we still talking about Republicans?" Panetta inexplicably asked.
"Of course. Who else would we be talking about?" VJ replied, looking surprised that the Secretary of Defense would ask such a question. "Who else is a mortal threat to our way of life? Where else is there a battle between the forces of lightness and darkness? Between those on the right side of history, those understanding this president's unwavering fight for freedom, common sense gun laws, women's rights, free health care for all, free education for all, and free contraception and those that would take us back to a backward time of history. One where a privileged minority group thought it had all the secrets of life and the power to rule at will and it viewed all those that disagreed  as needing enslavement, if not outright termination. What other forces living in the past, who would turn the clock back to dark times and put us under a religious theocracy are there?"
When she finished her soliloquy, "I know, Mr. Secretary, with your portfolio of defense issues, domestic concerns are foreign to you… but I, and this president, have to live in the whole world."
With clear-sighted advisers like Valerie Jarrett, The One can't go wrong.

* * *

We readjourned to the Situation Room and The One joined us wearing a sweat suit and carrying a basketball.
"Looks like everything's under control here… Hey, anyone for a game? Where's Sam?" he asked.
"She is indisposed, Mr. President," Jarrett informed him.
"Oh, too bad, I'm feeling hot. She won't skunk me like she did last time when she got insanely lucky… General, just thinking outside the box here; trying to get away from the usual response, the ones that have historically gotten us into these messes; what would be the possibility that we could have giant video screens airlifted in and suspended from helicopters hovering over the facility in Benghazi and I could then address the peaceful protesters? I'm sure once they saw my peaceful visage they'd go home. Remember how I wowed them in Cairo?" The One concluded.
The SecDef responded with a tone, "As the general said earlier that would take hours."
"Oh, no, Mr. Secretary," Gen. Dempsey countered. "We have them loaded on planes at Sigonella ready to go."
"What?" Panetta coughed.
"Yes sir, they're for the University of California Gay Men's Chorus tour of Libya and other North Africa destinations - The 'Peace, Love and C'mon Down to My Port, Baby, Tour.' We're providing security for them in case some of those Christian fundamentalists try to start something. The chorus was going to do a performance in Tripoli for Amb. Stevens. He's a U. Cal. man and, you know, plays for that team. Not that there's anything wrong with that," General Dempsey clearly explained. "They're also known as the Golden Bares. Get it, b-a-r-e-s not b-e-a-r-s, which is the school mascot..."
Panetta was shaking his head and mumbling, "This is like a goddamn nightmare."
"It's sponsored by the State Dept.'s cultural exchange program and funded by the Gorgos Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and is going to be a special on PBS this winter. We get in return a few hours with the 'Die Western Crusader Infidel and Zionist Pig Koran Education Squad'... So I'm sure we could round up some men at Sigonella and transfer the video equipment over to some helicopters. They got bunches of them around. It's less than an hour to Benghazi from Sigonella." Gen. Dempsey looked pleased that he could offer a nonviolent alternative solution.
"Leon, I like this idea," The One informed him.
Panetta was just staring at Dempsey.
"It's outside the box. And since these are harmless protesters and not at all terrorists, much less affiliated with al Qaeda, which I have brought to the brink of defeat, as all the experts have acknowledged, it fits the proper and measured and respectful response necessary. Look into it. Mr. Secretary, give him everything he needs."
"You killed in Cairo, Mr. President," Dempsey added.
"Yes, I did."