In the future, I would like to see every sentence that begins “The public official declined comment” end with the following words: “and was promptly terminated under the Mandatory Comment Act of 2013.”
The spur for this idea came from a Wall Street Journal article on an innocuous subject: An Iowa museum had removed a puppet from the lobby. Not just any puppet: Floppy, a mascot from an old children’s TV show that entertained corn-fed tots in the days before cable. Every town had one. Some fellow in a costume with an avuncular name would amble out, tell tales, talk to a jabbering piece of cloth with googly eyes, then run a cartoon. The show’s gone but the puppet was enshrined in the museum, delighting aging boomers for whom it was an object of veneration, like seeing Captain Kangaroo’s Mr. Bunny Rabbit.
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