Before I venture into conspiracy theory, I'll admit in the interest of full disclosure that I have a longstanding, comically-exaggerated phobia of mallard ducks.
When I was very little, I got a plush mallard to add to my stuffed animal collection. It spent one night in my room before I made my mother take it away because I said it talked to me.
So you can entertain my unease when I left my apartment the other day and encountered a pair of the feathered fiends waddling down my block, several roosting on the Capitol lawn and a couple doing laps in the fountain on Library Mall.
When I then saw on the news that a nesting mother mallard had settled beside a sapling outside the Treasury Department in Washington D.C. under Secret Service protection, I knew a wider web of potentially nefarious amphibious activity was afoot.
At first, I was surprised Bill Frist hadn't crept out in the dead of night weeks ago with a stencil and some brown paint and rendered an image Jesus in the D.C. duck's feathers. Then, he could have taken it under his wing and jaunted it off to \Justice Sunday"" as a quack-pleasing sign of divine sanction for the righteous right and their judicial crusade.
But he missed his opportunity, as the duck, whose nicknames include ""Duck Cheney"" and ""Quacks Reform,"" has become quite the attraction, with tourists, bureaucrats and diplomats all dropping by for a gander.
So do the powers that be honestly expect us to believe they haven't considered politically exploiting it?
Not only does the duck get the Secret Service detail, but they widened the fence around its nest to keep protesters at a recent economic summit from getting too close. They even put up signs telling visitors to keep quiet and not offer food.
Physically shielding the duck from voices of dissent, protecting it from crispy, salty snack foods... add to that the fact that one of the nearest bodies of water to the duck's location is the White House fountain, and it becomes clear: President Bush is plainly going to appoint it to a cabinet position.
Move over, presidential pooches, Dubya is grooming this duck to become ""first fowl."" Kids will love it, opinion-polled parents will love it and, heh, it's a duck!
There's just one (really, only one) snag in this yarn, and that's that the duck is a single mother. What kind of moral message would that send?
The ducks at UW have the ""real family"" agenda down. Like seemingly everyone else on this godforsaken campus these days, they've coupled off (and probably thereby become twice as miserable and half as interesting, as a dear friend would say). But what of that unbetrothed avian strumpet in the nation's capital, incubating her eggs of dubious paternity?
There could be no father at all. If the latest crop of nuts proclaiming nearing apocalypse are onto something, those eggs might hatch not ducklings, but the Antichrist-and what luck! Dubya, Dr. Frist and Tom Delay are right down the street to wage and win the battle for all (right-wing) souls.
But perhaps I'm getting carried away. After all, the government can't balance its books, take care of many it purports to represent or collect intelligence worth the moniker. Odds are it wouldn't be capable of conspiring with another species-even a race of creepy-ass talking mallards.
Holly Noe's final column will run on Monday. Toss her a morsel at flamingpurvis@yahoo.com.
