Humorist Dave Barry Mocks How Invasions, Obama Scandals End In 'Strongly Worded Reports'

December 28th, 2014 4:13 PM

Every year, The Washington Post Magazine is one of many newspapers that run humor columnist Dave Barry's long Year In Review humor article. It was fairly sedate toward Republicans in 2014, except for the usual fat joke: "In politics, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, responding to a radio interviewer’s questions about his alleged role in the 2013 'Bridgegate' lane-closure scandal, eats the interviewer."

He vaguely noted "the United States" (not Obama) didn't scare Vladimir Putin as he took Crimea, which "could ultimately result in the cancellation of Vladimir Putin’s American Express card." In addition to some toothless jokes about Secret Service failures, Barry mocked two Obama scandals the media wanted to forget, the VA scandal and the IRS scandal:

In domestic news, the Department of Veterans Affairs is engulfed in scandal following revelations that some VA hospitals are just now getting around to treating veterans of the War of 1812. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki tells a Senate committee that he is “mad as hell” about this, but he ends up resigning after he is out-angered by President Obama, who according to a top aide is “madder than hell.” Numerous Republicans declare that they, too, are extremely mad. Basically everybody in Washington is hopping mad about this scandal, leaving little doubt that it is only a matter of time before some strongly worded reports are generated....

In Washington scandal news, the Internal Revenue Service, responding to a subpoena, tells congressional investigators that it cannot produce 28 months of Lois Lerner’s e-mails because the hard drive they were stored on failed, and the hard drive was thrown away, and the backup tapes were erased, and no printed copies were saved — contrary to the IRS’s own record-keeping policy, which was eaten by the IRS’s dog. “It was just one crazy thing after another,” states the IRS, “and it got us to thinking: All these years we’ve been subjecting taxpayers to everything short of rectal probes if they can’t produce EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT WE WANT, and here we lose YEARS’ worth of official records! So from now on, if taxpayers tell us they lost something, or just plain forgot to make a tax payment, we’ll be like, ‘Hey, whatever! Stuff happens!’ Because who are we to judge?”

But all kidding aside, you can bet that before this thing is over there will be a strongly worded report.

Barry also made fun of how unwelcome Obama was on the campaign trail:

In politics, the big story is the looming midterm elections, which have President Obama crisscrossing the nation at a hectic pace in a last-ditch effort to find a Democratic candidate willing to appear in public with him. The president is finally able to schedule an event with 94-year-old R. Nordstrom Fleemer, who is running for his 17th term as road commissioner of Carwankle County, Tennessee. Fleemer appears pleased by the endorsement, although he refers to the president repeatedly as “Mr. Truman.”