Poor Socks the Cat, the puzzled feline who famously crouched on the sidewalk in front of the Clinton’s house back in ’93, providing the only photo op for frustrated news services in the weeks following the election … is dead.
After the euthanization, the body of Socks was deposited in Fort
Marcy Park, a federal park in Virginia where it was found by park
rangers. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) the ranking Republican on the
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has vowed an
investigation into the death of Socks, coming as it has, on the eve of
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to China. According to
congressional aides, the timing of the Socks death just as his former
owner was leaving the country is “suspicious, to say the least.
Probably criminal. Yeah. Really really criminal looking.”In related news, Regnery Publishing Inc, A Division of Eagle
Publishing, has commissioned noted author Lilian Jackson Braun to write
a tell-all book on the late Socks: The Cat Who Knew Too Fucking Much
to be published on Wednesday, February 25th. The slim tome is expected
to reach number one on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller list
the following week due to massive bulk orders shipped to 214
Massachusetts Ave NE Washington DC 20002-4999, as well as a copy to be
delivered gratis to all seventy-three people who subscribe to the
Washington Times.
I look forward to the fund-raising posts on this subject, surely already in the works, from Chief Editor Korir, and the imminent promise of a mysterious “tape” showing that Socks was in possession of crucial documents proving that President Obama was actually grown in an eerie green-tinted vat in an abandoned warehouse by the Cigarette-Smoking Man, Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man, and George Soros. The documents were stashed beneath Socks’ kitty box, and are now the subject of an international man … er, cathunt.
Silliness aside, this photo actually fills me with a lot of nostalgia – look at how many photos there were just hanging around outside the Clinton’s house, waiting for any kind of news to develop. Think of the resources that Big Media outlets had sixteen years ago … how they had the money in their budgets to devote to paying people just to stand around in a location in the hopes that something might happen.
While this may still happen (there were a lot of reporters hanging around the neighborhood in Chicago, trying to come up with some new angle on Obama), I think that this is going to be seen as an artifact of a vanished age. Nobody can afford to pay a photog’s salary, when all he comes up with is shots of a puzzled cat on a sidewalk.
…ask not for whom Socks the Cat meows, news industry; he meows for thee…