"Clones to the left of me, jokers to the right..." You REALLY have to click on ALL the links in this blogspot. How many clones can YOU find?
We knew this was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. First it was sheep. Then it was pigs and cows. Now, with the green light from the FDA, its people. Not just any people, mind you, but committee-people. And GOP committee-people, at that.
And so it was, in a news conference craftily staged in front of the Western Beef in Mineola, that Joe Mondello (so, he really is a living legend!), State and still Nassau County Chair of the Republican Party, announced that the first (that we know of) human cloning would take place in New York, under the auspices of the Genome Oversight Project -- or GOP, for short.
GOP spokesman, Tony "You're-in-the-Navy-Now" Santino, said that cloning would be an invaluable tool in assuring the preservation and future dominance of the party.
"Imagine, if you will," postured Santino, "that rather than having Joe Ra [Oh no! Another Joe Ra, already...] wear many hats -- as in committeeman, Town Attorney, counsel for Sanitary District 6 (did I miss any?) -- we can actually clone Joe so he really could be ten places at once -- collecting, of course, all ten salaries and all ten pensions."
"Sweet," said Joe Ra, reached for comment simultanously at his Town Hall office, at Sanitary District 6 HQ on Cherry Valley Avenue in West Hempstead, and from a beach chair on the sands of Fort Lauderdale. "Maybe they'll let one of my clones take back my old job as Councilman... Damn you, Joe Kearney. You ruined it for all of us!"
Emi Endo, a reporter for Newsday who routinely covers Hempstead Town Hall, suspects that cloning within the Nassau County GOP may have been going on for quite some time, even preceding FDA approval.
"I began to wonder," Endo said, "when the Town's press releases had Tony Santino appearing in Westbury wearing his GOP spokesman hat, while at the same moment, attending a GOP fundraiser and the Sand Castle in Franklin Square in his position as GOP Committeeman. To top that, he was also at a civic meeting -- same hour, same minute -- in Oceanside. It was kinda bizarre!"
Ms. Endo denied being a clone herself. "I am not a clone," the ace reporter protested. "I'm Asian-American. We all look alike to you guys!"
"We were scratching our heads, too," quipped a frustrated Jay Jacobs, Chair of the Nassau County Democratic Party. "Clearly, there's enough of Tony (Santino) to go around, so no one would ever question some DNA missing here, or a bit of protoplasm missing there. Cloning! How do you think Maureen O'Connell got all those flyers in the mail -- and to folks who don't even live in the 7th Senatorial District? They're all 'cut and paste' on that side of the aisle."
"Yeah, I got one of those O'Connell flyers, too," chimed Pat Nicolosi, President of the Elmont East End Civic Club. "And my house in Elmont is nowhere near Mike Balboni's old district. Must be that old GOP magic at work."
Concerns over mutations and other genetic defects as a side effect of the cloning process were poo-pooed by Santino (a certified expert at poo-pooing), who assured the media that "years of selective inbreeding within the GOP" meant that only those with the coveted patronage gene would survive. "Not to worry," declared a jubilant Santino. "We're all of the same mold, here."
For their part, the Democrats, fearing what Dorothy Goosby called the "body snatcher effect," rejected the idea of genetic cloning as a political tool. "There's only one Dot Goosby on the Hempstead Town Board," said the lone Democratic Councilwoman, "and what appears at every vote to be six Kate Murray clones. Talk about a 'herd mentality!'"
According to reports leaked out of Nassau County Republican Headquarters, approximately 15% of the Town of Hempstead's workforce has already been cloned. "Looks to me like a good third of the supervisors at the Town's Sanitary Districts are clones," so stated Nassau County Comptroller, Howard Weitzman, waving the reports over his head. "I dare to guesstimate that the Town's payroll is bloated by some $50 million a year just to carry these clones. Its unconscionable."
Hindsight being 20-20, other GOP clone sightings come quickly to the mind of Harvey Levinson, the Nassau County Assessor, who, in 2005, ran unsuccessfully against Hempstead Town Supervisor Kate Murray. "I always knew there was something fishy about a hundred or so GOP operatives showing up during the campaign at the Franklin Square Library to protest my Assessment forum," said Levinson. "Come to think of it, they all had the same blank expressions on their faces, as if they'd been stripped of both emotion and intellect."
Levinson vigorously denied that he himself was a clone, a charge once levied against him by Don Clavin (Ooops! Wrong Clavin), Receiver of Taxes for the Town of Hempstead. [Clavin denied having made the accusation. "I said he was a 'drone,'" Clavin retorted, "not a 'clone!'"]
In related news, the Albany Times Union reported that reliable sources in the NYS Senate have uncovered a secret Member-Item stash, traced to Majority Leader Joe Bruno, clandestinely appropriating more that $13 million over the last six years to the Genome Oversight Project.
"Geez," cried Bruno. "How did they find out about that one?" [Could it be, Joe, that as a condition for getting the dough, they had to name it "The Joseph L. Bruno Genome Oversight Project"?] "Aw, heck," stomped Bruno. "I shoulda let Dean Skelos take that one. . ."
Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of Hempstead Town Hall, where printing presses hum day and night, churning out Murraygram after Murraygram, scientists are working feverishly to perfect the cloning process, Supervisor Kate Murray always close at hand, supervising. [In fact, there's a sign, right there in the basement of Hempstead Town Hall, that reads, Improving The Human Condition, One Republican Clone At A Time! The Joseph L. Bruno Genome Oversight Project. Kate Murray, Supervisor.] Font size should probably be reversed...
And as yet another glorious day dawns in the west over Town Hall (no mistake -- the sun rises in the west over there), a lone Town of Hempstead Safety Officer moseys past, insiduously -- if not unwittingly -- singing, "send in the clones. . ."
Ah, don't bother, they're here!
- - -
THIS JUST IN: President George W. Bush announced this morning that he would send an additional 20,000 troops into Town of Hempstead Sanitary District 6. "We must free the good people of the Five Towns from the evils of the fundamentalist trash collectors," said the president. "If the good people of Hempstead Town aren't strong enough or smart enough to free themselves from the abuses of these self-serving taxing jurisdictions, we'll just have to do it for them."
Meanwhile, it was rumored today that Nathaniel "Let Them Eat Bread On Passover" Swergold, Counsel to Sanitary District 1 and curator at the Five Town's Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, will be replaced in his post at SD1 by Nouri Maliki, the current Prime Minister of Iraq. "I know garbage when I see it," exclaimed Maliki. "And who better to run a dysfunctional fiefdom itself defined by waste, corruption, and ineptitude, eh?"
And where's Kate Murray in all of this? Apparently, waiting for her "mandate" from the people, and, as is too often the case, way out of control.
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