The Bietman White House had changed a lot since Gerald Zandt had become Chief of Staff. Not necessarily in the way that he would have liked, but change it had.
He paused now before entering the Oval Office, bracing himself for the new decor. The new staff Geropsychologist had ordered a significant makeover of the place to accommodate the President’s short attention span and undependable memory. The President seemed to be adapting to the changes very quickly–to the extent that an eighty-year-old man did anything very quickly. But the new look was beyond jarring to everyone else who was compelled to come in here.
Inside the door the dim lighting served as background for a large bright display:

Welcome to the
Simulnaseum
Version 1.1.28

The letters were a foot high and seemed emblazoned with neon. But he forced himself to walk through them into the room.
Another page of scrolling text dropped down from the high ceiling:

Warning!
This area is managed by simulation software developed by the Memolux Corporation
‘Is It Real…Or Is It Memolux?’ TM

Images you see beyond this point may be mnemonic projections, visual and audible representations of thoughts or memories produced by the software operator or his./her agent. Thus, objects which appear tangible may not be. Caution is advised when navigating.

The text dissolved as he advanced into the room, and the twilight of the Oval Office coalesced around him. The President sat behind his massive desk in a block of grey against the withering light from the three tall windows behind him.
The new staff geropsychologist, Doctor Luka Lysenko, was standing by the desk with her ever-present IPad in her left hand. She was dressed in what Zandt liked to call ‘Therapist Grey’; non-threatening background camouflage with a little splash of color around the neck.
She was kind of a dish if you liked the high school librarian type. On the good side of forty with a Katherine Hepburn vibe. Her accent was Eastern European, but she had a high security clearance, so Zandt tried to ignore the resemblance between her voice and the threatening hiss of the evil Irma Bundt from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”. She was actually the model of courtesy, but then again so was the average James Bond villain.
Zandt closed the open button on his jacket as he sat down. He was easily the best-dressed man in Washington and knew how to wear Dior. When one was sitting across the desk of the President of the United States, there was no reason to be sloppy.
“Mr. President,” he prompted, trying to meet the unfocused gaze of the older man.
He looked up at Doctor Lysenko.
“What’s he doing?” he wondered.
The Doctor’s right hand went to her IPad. A cartoon coyote materialized in the air over the desk.
“Watching Road Runner cartoons,” she said.
“That’s supposed to focus his attention?” Zandt wondered.
“We’ve made a list of his ten most vivid memories,” she said. “This is number four.”
The cartoon coyote suspended a grand piano over a desert road with a long rope as the cartoon road runner sped towards him.
“How is this supposed to make him more attentive to the business at hand?”
When the road runner shot past him before the piano could fall, the coyote looked up with bleak cartoon eyes as the shadow of the huge descending instrument covered his head.
“Once his concentration is achieved, it can be turned anywhere. Now when you engage him, he will automatically be more susceptible to sensory stimulus of any kind. Watch.”
Doctor Lysenko pressed another button on the IPad. The cartoon vanished.
“Gerry!” President Bietman smiled. “What’s new?”
“Your Homeland Security Secretary is being impeached, Mr. President.”
“Do you know that the average forty year old American has watched four times more cartoons than television news?”
“That’s kind of depressing,” Zandt concluded.
“Not for politicians,” Bietman said. “Think of how crummy our ratings would be if everybody started paying attention!”
Zandt wrote on his yellow legal pad:
“Voter apathy”
“Perhaps that accounts for the lack of coverage for the Mayorkas impeachment hearings,” Zandt said, trying to turn the conversation back to his briefing points.
Bietman looked baffled. “The who hearings?”
“Mayorkas,” Zandt repeated. “Your Homeland Security Secretary.” He looked at Doctor Lysenko.
“Memory and name recognition have not improved as much as mental acuity,” Lysenko explained. “The President has only trained on the Simulnaseum for a week. We will add enhanced name recognition features shortly.”
“Mayorkas? The Mexican guy?” Bietman wondered.
“He’s Cuban,” Zandt pointed out.
“Geez! You’d think the Republicans would give him a pass.”
“Why?”
“Cubans are the only Hispanics that ever voted for a Republican.”
“I’m guessing he’s not one of them.”
“Hey Luka!” Bietman called to the psychologist standing at the window. “Why don’t we try that face recognition thing?”
“Certainly, Mr. President,” Lysenko said. She tapped in some instructions on the Ipad in her hand.
A huge picture of the current Homeland Security Secretary hovered between the two men. He was a handsome, hairless middle aged man in the standard Washington blue suit. His name hung over his head.
“Holy Smoke!” Bietman chuckled. “That’s a mouthful! How do you pronounce that?”
Dr. Lysenko made an adjustment on her IPad.
“Alejandro Nicolas Mayorkas,” a voice came out of nowhere.
“Man!” Bietman said. “I bet Fidel Castro would have a hard time getting that one out. Yet every right-wing copy boy at Fox News would laugh in my face if I couldn’t repeat that name ten times fast with a mouthful of marbles!”
“So,” Zandt continued. “What should our response be to the impeachment news?”
“I guess it depends on why they’re impeaching him.”
“Thousands of illegal aliens are crossing the border every day,” Zandt answered.
“Well, it’s not like he has control of that.”
“He’s the Homeland Security Secretary! He’s in charge of the Immigration Service, the Border Patrol and all of the intelligence agencies!”
“Good point,” the President nodded thoughtfully. “So if the Republicans give him the axe, who do we get instead?”
“We can’t just abandon him, sir!”
“Screw him!” Bietman said. “He’s a Cuban. A lot of Latinos don’t even think Cubans are Hispanic. He probably voted for Reagan.”
“The impeachment probably won’t pass in the Senate,” Zandt assured.
“If it does, we should nominate a black gay woman.”
“With due respect, Mr. President,” Zandt argued. “Don’t you think we’ve played that card often enough?”
“Naw!” Bietman countered. “This is a perfect chance to increase support from the blacks and gays and women at the same time! What could be better?”
“The Republicans will accuse you of pandering again.”
“So? It is pandering!” Bietman admitted. “What of it? Does it strengthen our voting base? Does the Democratic Party become a permanent home to homosexuals and blacks and women and those who sympathize with their plight as historical targets for discrimination! Yes! What’s the problem?”
Zandt dutifully wrote in his yellow legal pad:
“AC/DC Homie for HSS”
“What if there are no black gay women qualified?”
“What’s there to be qualified for?” Bietman wondered. “You show up here once a month, write down my instructions and hold the fort till some wiseguy Republican finds the three hundred million you’ve got hidden in the Cayman Islands.”
Zandt shot a worried glance at Dr. Lysenko. She walked over to him.
“You have to consider that this Simulation is a reflection of the President’s unedited thoughts,” Dr. Lysenko said. “Undoubtedly, he would be somewhat less candid in a normal conversation outside this room.”
“I should think so.”
She tapped on the IPad, and many colorful buttons and gauges materialized in rapid succession. “We probably enhanced the levels of Veritase to an unnecessary degree.”
“What’s ‘Veritase’?”
“A virtual macro-neural agent we often employ to reduce the human mind’s natural propensity to disguise or divert from facts it finds uncomfortable or inconvenient.”
Zandt wrote on his legal pad:
“Veritase!…Lux Et?”
“Why would you enhance the level at all?”
“The President has the lowest level of Veritase we’ve observed since the Clinton administration.”
“I guess one would have to chalk up that lack as a ‘useful political skill’.” Zandt concluded. “Okay, Mr. President. Let’s move to Afghanistan.”
“No thanks,” Bietman said, laughing. “I was there as Vice President maybe ten years ago and that dump made North Dakota look like the Fourth of July in Miami Beach.”
Hanging in the air over the desk was a mind’s-eye view of a cold, empty desert wilderness that reached from horizon to horizon unbroken by any details except a few bomb-etched hills and a scattering of parched grey bushes.
It was amazing all the detail the old man could remember, Zandt mused. If half of what he recalled was accurate, this was a worthless wasteland that the American taxpayer could neither repair nor find a reason to try.
“I mean, let’s talk about the Afghan aid bill the Republicans are holding up.”
“Republican Money Pit” , Zandt wrote on his legal pad.
“That’s the big difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Bietman said. “We both do things that in hindsight look really stupid, but at least us Democrats own it. Look at Vietnam. We saw it was a dumb idea early on, but we kept at it till the Republicans took over and made Dick Nixon kill it. Now when people read what a mess Nixon made of the withdrawal, everybody blames him.”
“Just so I understand, sir. Are you saying that, because George Bush started the Afghan war, his party should continue to throw money at a problem they discovered already that they couldn’t fix?”
“I see it this way,” Bietman explained. “Democrats look at a stupid war like Catholics look at a bad marriage. If you find out you bought a lemon, you just try to make the best of it. When a Republican politician starts a stupid war and finds out he made the wrong move, he wants a divorce right away,”
“You could argue that–“
The scene above the desk shifted to the rapid-fire horror show that was September 11th, 2001 in New York City. The scenes flashed by more quickly than a television camera could capture, and the smoke and dust and fear seeped into the room.
Zandt coughed discretely as the President spoke through the ethereal cityscape.
“Bush spent two trillion–Trillion with a ‘T’–dollars on the Afghan war after a roomful of Saudi Arabian college kids flew through the air defenses of the whole east coast and knocked down a couple buildings with some passenger planes. So, follow this logic. Saudi Arabians attack us, so that dumb bastard George Bush invades Afghanistan. People dump on me when I forget the name of a terrorist group in Iran with eleven syllables in it, but George Bush starts a two trillion dollar war with the wrong bleeping country–and he’s home free. Not only that, he spends two decades there, turns an area twice the size of Texas into a giant crater–and loses! And that senile old Joel Bietman is the idiot, right?”
Zandt nodded. “I see your point, but–“
“Two hundred and fifty thousand people were killed in that nutball’s wars, and nobody’s questioning his mental competency!” Bietman almost shouted. “When I forgot the name of the French President, at least nobody died!”
“There’s that,” Zandt conceded. “Yeah.”
The smoke-laden Trade Center crumbled into mnemonic dust on the empty streets of Kabul where Bietman remembered walking with a large military escort as Vice President. It was the capital city of a major ally, hosting a representative of its primary benefactor, yet only heavily armed uniformed soldiers could be seen on the streets. It was almost like nobody cared what America had done for them. Or nobody wanted America to find out what the invisible people actually thought of what America had done for them.

“So if the Republicans want to hold up the Afghan aid package to make me cut the weapons to Ukraine, they’re out of luck,” Bietman concluded. “All the Democrats have to do is point out to the Afghans what dopes they are trusting the Republicans to help them out after levelling every building in their country and leaving them with a pile of Monopoly money that won’t buy them a pound of dirt.”
“Pound of dirt,” Zandt wrote on his legal pad.
“There’s something in what you say, Mr. President,” Zandt agreed. “We’ll let the Republicans work that out, then,”
“Let them do that,” Bietman said. “In the meantime, they can think about what they’re going to tell their defense industry donors when they call up wondering where all the new weapons contracts are. That’s another thing they can’t blame on poor old Joel. I was going to make all that defense business happen for them. But no! The Republicans just have to look every gift horse in the mouth, just in case some Democrat is hiding inside.”
“Democrat Money Pit,” Zandt wrote on the legal pad.
“We’re already outside of the interview’s targeted twenty-minute window,” Dr. Lysenko said. “We should let the President rest.”
“Got it,” Zandt agreed.
“Mr. President,” Zandt stood. “I will send you a list of applicants I consider qualified, with your preferences in mind.”
Bietman looked confused. “Applicants for what?”
“The Homeland Security position?”
“Don’t we have that Mexican guy in there already?”
“Yes sir,” Zandt shook his head at Dr. Lysenko.
The streets of dusty Kabul faded into black as Zandt walked into the apocalyptic Afghan horizon.
Bietman watched Zandt’s retreating back till the office door closed behind him. He settled back into his chair and his eyes fluttered closed.
“He seems like he knows what he’s doing,” Bietman told Dr. Lysenko. “But sometimes he sounds just like a Republican.”
Hanging above the President’s desk, the powdered rubble of the Afghan wild blew over the scattered piles of brick and concrete littering a nearly abandoned Ukrainian town crumbling into the banks of the Dnipro River. Scattered presidential memories of a quarter century’s arbitrary destruction floated across the insides of Beitman’s tired old eyes as he drifted into the uneasy sleep of an antique Caesar, eager for the conquest of lands already ruined beyond redemption, and for the honors the American presidency no longer deserved.