Joe Biden’s summer vacation

Tomorrow, The Committee will bundle up Joe Biden, titular president of the United States, and take him for a nice ride across the big, big ocean in a very shiny airplane. Weeee! No details have been released yet about what flavors of ice cream he will enjoy, but The Committee’s press arm has been full of stories with titles like ‘Three things to watch on Biden’s first foreign trip’.

This is not a difficult assignment. The big boys and girls who arrange Joe’s play-dates have told all his favorite friends in the media exactly what to say. And just a couple of days ago they surprised Joe with an article in one of his favorite newspapers, the Washington Post. It was just so nice. A couple of the minders got together and wrote the article and then put Joe’s name on it. Joe was just so excited to see that.

‘Did I do that?’ he asked when he sounded out the bit that said: ‘Thanks to the American Rescue Plan and our domestic vaccination strategy, our economy is now growing faster than at any time in almost 40 years. We have created more jobs in the first four months of our administration than under any other president.’

‘Sure you did,’ they said, though everyone knew it was someone else who developed the vaccines, who oversaw their manufacture and distribution and whose economic policies led to the lowest unemployment in history.

But those are details with which The Committee never bothers Joe. Joe knows about and does not like the person who did all that. That bad man said mean things to Joe and it upsets him to hear his name. So no one talks out loud about him when Joe is in the room.

The great thing about that article in the paper — even though (between us) it is chock full of lies, exaggerations, misattributions and various other sorts of tendentious falsehoods — is that, reading it, we know just what Joe will do on his summer vacation!

First, just like the pussy cat, pussy cat in the rhyme, he’s off to London to visit the Queen. Wot larks! He also has a play-date with his new buddy Boris. Joe’s minders said he could bring along his special Monopoly game, the one with lots and lots of extra money, so Joe and Boris and their friends can buy lots and lots of properties and build houses and hotels on them all. It will be such fun.

After spending all that money, Joe and his friends will tell the world about their new game: grab all the world’s money! It’s global Monopoly time! Get all the property. Bankrupt everyone! Call it a ‘global tax initiative’. Start slow, at, say 15 percent. Then corner the market. Take everything. The spoilsports will never dare to break up the game once Joe and his friends get going in earnest.

For his next adventure, Joe will go to Brussels, which is in Belgium, to visit some of the same friends who played with him and Boris in England. That will be fun, too. And Brussels has terrific ice cream. His minders told him about that. And chocolate, too! In Brussels, they will play Stratego, Risk and other fun games. And there will be dress-up, too, and tanks and jets and things.

The last part of summer camp should be the most exciting. Joe won’t get to go to Russia this time — what a blast that would have been — but he will get to meet a real Russian in Switzerland! What fun that will be — unless, of course, the Russian in question reminds Joe about the time he said all those mean things about him. In truth, Joe forgot that he said them, but then he forgets so many things these days, which is why the nice men in suits make him recite that bit from Hilaire Belloc every morning: ‘Always keep a-hold of Nurse/ For fear of finding something worse.’