WASHINGTON, DC — Since President Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election and subsequently being swept into the majority in the 2010 mid-terms, House Republicans have conducted several, high-profile scandal investigations. What some Americans might not realize is that each scandal has gotten its own, unique, copyrighted name. “Having official names for our scandal investigations ensures that we protect our anti-intellectual property,” Speaker John Boehner recently told The Lafayette Journal and Boat Racing Guide. “People buy our Benghazi, Fast & Furious, and IRS t-shirts all the time. Hell, we still sell tons of Stop ACORN shirts and they’ve been out of business for like half a decade now,” Boehner told the paper. Their latest scandal is no different; it now has an officially trademarked name, and Boehner was holding a press conference to announce it.
“We felt this important enough,” Boehner told reporters out in front of Tipsy’s, a bar Boehner frequents in the DC area, “that we give it a name that will truly evoke the levels of hysteria and fact-free supposition of conspiracy that has become the hallmark of Republican leadership.” Boehner said that he and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), the current chairman of the House Oversight Committee poured over thousands of suggestions from Republican voters and ultimately decided on Hillmailghazigate because it had “the appropriate mix of her name and suffixes that allude to other scandals” but that they had wished they could “make some kind of reference to the Holocaust too, since we all know Democrats support the American holocaust of abortion” but ultimately decided to stick to the three basics: Hillary Clinton, Benghazi and Watergate.
Reporters caught up with Gowdy outside a South Carolina gun range where Gowdy was attending an event sponsored the NRA to encourage residents of the state to support laws that would nullify any Federal gun restrictions that might come in the future. He was asked about not just the name he and Boehner chose for their newest investigation, but why they felt that yet another scandal investigation was warranted when his party has already spent millions of dollars investigating several other scandals, but without revealing any damning evidence that would require further legal action whatsoever. Gowdy scoffed at the questions. “Just because our exhaustive and expensive multiple investigations into the same three or four things hasn’t turned up anything new, surprising or truly scandalous at the end of the day, that doesn’t mean we can’t start new investigations. If at first you don’t succeed, hold more obvious political theater until you accidentally uncover something actually newsworthy,” said Gowdy.
Reporters asked Gowdy if he’s looking for a Benghazi connection in the emails, since it’s already been well-established that no rule existed at the State Department barring officials from using personal email account servers for official government business. “Everything is connected to Benghazi, don’t you see that,” asked Gowdy in response. Another reporter asked him why there’s so much anger over Clinton using a personal email server in the post-9/11 world we live in, where every digital communication is sucked up into the government’s massive data warehouse in Utah anyway. Gowdy simply blinked and said, “Because Benghazi, stupid.”
“If the American people didn’t want us holding these investigations,” Boehner said at his press conference, “they would have brought their state-required voter IDs with them to the polls in numbers great enough to break the gerrymandering scheme we put in place that ensures the House stays semi-permanently in our control no matter what the Senate does, thereby ensuring gridlock and scandal investigations, otherwise known as Republican Governance.” Reporters asked Boehner if he plans to put Gowdy’s Benghazi select committee on hold so that the South Carolinian Republican can focus on Hillmailghazigate, to which Boehner laughed and did a spit-take with his scotch.
“Are you out of your mind,” Boehner asked as he wiped scotch from his chin. “We’re Republicans. We can’t stop pretending that every burp, fart, or sneeze is a high-crime if it comes from a Democrat. If we stop feeding into our voters delusions about how scandal-plagued and wasteful government is by wasting millions of dollars chasing made-up scandals…what will we have left? Actual legislative work? Eww. Grody to the max.”
