Photo by Gage Skidmore
Warning: The following article might be satire.
October 2018
Dear Dunc,
May I call you Dunc? I want to be familiar with you. I want to know you. I’ll tell you the straight stuff: I want to be a crook.
As it stands, I’m a greedy teacher. I know! Children, facts, unions, books!
It’s all so frightfully boring, so paperwork-y and tedious. Some of my children are homeless. They live in vans. Sometimes I show them pictures of your sprawling Alpine home just to make them feel bad about not being born rich, like you.
I’m on my way, Dunc. With enough practice in the dark arts of shell-game financing, I can be the new you. True, as it stands, I have to actually go to work and buy my own groceries. Mostly canned goods. You golf and have sex with multiple partners around Washington and spend campaign money on yourself. #GOALS.
And, well, that’s why I need your help, Dunc.
I want you to assist me in my sinister mission to be the most awful and corrupt man to pound San Diego County’s crumbling pavement! (True, I’ll need to save up for decent shoes because of our poor streets, but I digress!)
Now, who would know better how to achieve this than you, right? I must admit it squarely: I’ve been following you. But not only you. Your wife, Margaret, and your many, many lovers. I may rent a room, a shabby barn of a place, but I have followed you in your “crimes.”
On June 21, 2011, for example, I was there, panting and hiding in the cacti when you went to the Liason Hotel with “Individual 14” of the indictment against you. I saw the crookedness I know I can I achieve, too — as soon as I can come up with the $162.02 for a similar hotel room.
And the $3,500 for your children’s private Christian school that you spent after the affair(s)? Pure “holy” genius! (And the way they kept the money, too. I love organized religion.) And the way you disguised hundreds of dollars in golf as, “Some Christian thing.” (Ineloquent, selfish, and sacrilegious! It’s so you, Dunc! And I know it can be me, too!)
As for me, after the hotel experience, when I followed you to various stores I was startled by your ineptitude at finding a deal. But then I realized that spending more than any reasonable or mildly intelligent person would on basic food items, the sheer outrageous prodigal squandering of it all, that was the very point! Pure corruption! You inherited your father’s seat to become the Prince of Fraudulence!
Personally, I’ve never spent $3,100 on overdue Cox fees or shelled out $1,500 on video games. I’m no good with money, not really. I foolishly squander it on food and rent. You had your campaign pay $3,000 to Panda Express and Pizza Hut and $1,200 for your SDG&E bill. My internet was shut off. I’m actually handwriting this letter.
Now, the truth is I tailed your car. It was quite a challenge. Even though the gleaming wax job and the garish “MAGA” sticker on your luxury Lincoln made it easy to follow, I had to push my jalopy part of the way, and the congested traffic made things worse. Speaking of congestion: Did you sponsor any successful bills on infrastructure? No matter! Really, who am I to ask for total corruption, gross legislative inaction, astonishing intellectual mediocrity, and a total lack of independent accomplishment in one man?
When I finally caught up to you in my wheezing lemon of a vehicle, arriving behind you at East County’s big box stores, I became something of a shadow character in your corruption. A Dostoyevskian double! (Just skip that part, Dunc. Keep reading.) You shelled out $11,000 at Costco. Then $5,700 at Wal-Mart. I can’t actually afford a Costco membership yet, but when I do, I want to know: What does it feel like to spend $6,000 at Albertsons? Or $113 at Jake’s in Del Mar?
Dunc, you and I both know you spent a lot of campaign money on adulterous dates. And horse races, too. True, you overpaid for drinks when other congressmen were around. Always Mr. Big Shot! And it was pure golden glory the way you stiffed the waiters, a perfect touch of shamelessness. Rich-kid sheik! And that $42 Uber ride to and from “her” house in October, making the five anonymous ladies you kept on the side host once in a while, right Dunc? (When I get the internet and my apps back up, Bumble is going to get STUNG with my charm! I can say “family values” and “my place or yours” through my forked tongue, just as easily! )
Personally, as a loser, I like the way you misspent all of the campaign funds on yourself. None of this “man of the people” hooey. No, “I’m a family man” and “I love my children” claptrap! I admire the frigid, ice-cold gall of spending the cash on golf. Yes, golf! Sometimes, a philanderer just needs a wedge! What rich white man doesn’t feel the itch to get a bellyful of suds and get ankle deep in a sand trap? Cads and caddies, am I right, Dunc? I can only speculate. I’ve never played.
Admittedly, I want to spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on golf, too! I want to talk about my side-lovers with other bro-fakes and then write it off to the feds as “balls for wounded warriors”! I want to be YOU, Dunc! I want to use veterans as a convenient shield for my luxury! The truth is I’m tired of working for the public and paying taxes. I want to fit in the style of the times.
And your whole “look” is the perfect fit for our crooked era, too. The “I-drink-excessively-because-my-ambitious-Dad-never-loved-me-and-I-grew-up-entitled-the-very- definition-of-white-privilege”-persona you affect in every public appearance is genius! And I understand it now, Dunc: IT ISN’T A PURELY PHONEY ACT. The unscrupulous corruption. The bottomless narcissism. The empty-suited guile. All of it is just true-blue-you. I want to be a genuine fraud, too. I’m just too earnest. Yes, poor and earnest.
Regardless, I love it. I’m quitting my career as a woebegone chalk-scratcher! (As soon as I pay my loans and rent, of course.) I will be reborn and I, too, can make this country great.
Sadly, a penniless loser, I need to teach in a few hours. And my pencil is out of lead. (Much like my 35-person classroom is out of desks.)
The polls have you nearly tied with your opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, who wants to expand Medicare and end debt for young people. We can still beat him, Dunc!
Aspirationally Yours In Princely Corruption,
Brett Warnke
Brett Warnke
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Straighten up, Warnke, or you’ll be sentenced to washing The Dunk’s bedsheets for life!
Nah, I’ll bring my undies to federal prison. He can wash them in-between his shifts on license plate-duty and polishing MS-13 gangmembers’ shoes.