President Donald J. Trump claimed another victory today, as the first conclusive data emerged linking his policy agenda with steadily improving employment numbers. A study by the Bureau of Labor statistics has determined that, by far, the area of largest growth in the U.S. Economy is in Television Punditry. Since January, in fact, there has been a 47% increase in hiring amongst those willing to defend the various policy positions and public relations gaffes of the fledgling administration.
The President greeted this news with his usual sense of decorum and modesty, via Twitter. “Huge jobs report! Massive numbers! Snowflakes can thank me now! They said we couldn’t do it but we did. #promiseskept #cantstopwinning” This was followed by another, clarifying tweet. “Numbers used to be fake but now they are real! Couldn’t be better if I had written them myself. But I didn’t. Really.”
Sources in the know confirm the reports findings, as they relate to Presidential Prevarication. “It’s definitely a growth industry.” Said Malcolm Guile, President of Calumny Incorporated, a specialized employment service that has experienced the largest single quarter growth in its history. “It seems like every time the President opens his mouth or logs into twitter, we get another call from the news networks asking for someone, anyone to defend him.”
CNN President Jeff Zucker agrees with this assessment of this market for mendacity. “We’re on the air 24/7, and we have to be ready, all the time. The President, or one of his people, says something ridiculous at least five or six times a day, sometimes at 3 AM, and we need to be ready to respond. That takes a lot of people. And not just anybody, either. I mean, if he is going to claim that there were 3 million fraudulent votes cast in the election, or that there was a Bowling Green Massacre, or that Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons, not just any everyday liar will do. Only a world class dissembler can make me believe any of that. We need specialists for that kind of work.”
And the issue isn’t just the, easily provable, falsehoods uttered from the oval office that are driving this staffing need. According to Zucker, it is also the omnipresent missteps that need to be whitewashed. “Do you remember when the President acted like he had just heard of Frederick Douglass and thought he might be alive? Or when he failed to mention 6 million murdered Jews in his International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement? Only a First Class Fabricator could sell that as anything short of crazy.”
When it was suggested that, perhaps, it was not the purpose of a news organization to “sell” any story, Zucker seemed confused. “We run about 450 commercials a day. My whole job is to sell things, no matter how crazy.” When asked about CNN’s journalistic standards, he scoffed. “That’s what NPR is for. If you want responsible journalism you are going to have to look somewhere other than television news. What I want to see is some lunatic in a suit claiming that Trump’s attempts to eliminate healthcare subsidies for the poor makes him like Martin Luther King. Now that’s good TV!”
CNN is not the only network to feel this way. According to Guile, his agency has been flooded with requests from ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC as well. “It’s almost too much to keep up with. It began with the ‘inaugural attendance issue’ but really began to pick up steam after the ‘your microwave is spying on you affair.’ There’s been no looking back since then. I’ve been shipping out the shady as fast as we can train them. It’s like this administration is an insensitivity engine and I’m the head mechanic. It’s my job to pretend there’s no smoke, when you can see the flames pouring out under the hood.”
Asked how he is able to maintain his standards of excellence in equivocation, in the face of such heavy demand, Guile was unusually honest. “We’ve had to cut a few corners to keep up the supply. All the first class liars are out there already. These days, if a person can look me, unblinkingly, in the eye and tell me that Donald Trump is qualified to be President, I’m gonna hire them.”
Though ironclad confidentiality agreements prevent Guile from identifying which personalities were hired from his firm, he was able to give us some clues. “Alternative facts, well, we might have had something to do with that.” When asked, point blank, if press secretary Sean Spicer came from his ranks, he just smiled. “We do have some standards, you know.”
So just how lucrative is this business of BS? “Well,” said Guile, “lying has always been something of a cottage industry in politics. But now that cottage is more like a mansion in Beverly Hills, and another in Manhattan and another on Maui…”
Asked about one specific entity absent from his client list, Fox News, far and away the most popular cable news outlet, Guile replied. “They haven’t really needed us. They’ve had a staff front loaded with professional liars ever since their inception. Frankly it has been hard to get through the door. However, ” he said, with a slight smile, “I understand that there is an opening for the O’Reilly slot.”
Follow @GuyFromCNY on Twitter
Or check out my Facebook Page