Because It's Friday Afternoon...

I want to be a bit pop cultural for a minute and note the sheer genius of this item from The Onion. I don't know if there's a particular person who writes their government-oriented humor items, but the Onion is unusually good at capturing--and parodying--the cadences of bureaucratic language and official statements. Take this excerpt from the all-time classic from 2007, "Dept. of Evil: 'All of You Must Die'.":

Originally established by an act of Congress in 1953 and granted broader powers and funding in 1986 under the second Reagan administration, the Department of Evil has been an occasional source of controversy. Its 1993 And The Streets Shall Run Red With The Blood Of The Innocent initiative was highly criticized at the time by moderates, who thought the department's agenda overly harsh.

Enlarge Image Department Of Evil Jump

An official from the Department of Evil described their 2007 strategic action plan at a conference in January. In 2004, an ambitious plan to seed the clouds with blood and then rain excruciation down upon the thrice-damned didn't even make it past a Senate budget committee, which criticized the plan as poorly conceived. And last year, the department received a stinging blow after Congress voted to allocate only one-third of the money requested to swell the ranks of its deranged, barbarous demon cavalry.

Despite those recent setbacks, a DOE spokesbeast said that the dread secretary remains confident that his department will prevail in the end.

Ridiculous, of course, but also a totally dead-on description of the difficulties agencies have with Congress, and the kind of confident statements spokesmen put out to spin those difficulties. I know for folks working in government, it's no fun to be mocked, but I don't think this is really what the Onion is doing. These pieces actually have a kind of empathy, I think. And it's part of what makes them so funny.