Extreme Reed Makeover

Matt Taibbi, who was touting his book Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart the other night, wrote an article in the New York Press from the perspective of the a post-nuclear holocaust history text by William Shirer IV called The Rise and Fall of the United States.

In the article, he discusses his own part in that fall, where — prior to his own humiliation and eventual execution — he develops a Queer Eye-inspired reality television show called Extreme Fascist Makeover that begins with a redo of the White House:

In the program, five fascists of various types–one Le Penite, one German Nazi, one Italian blackshirt, one Spanish Falangist and an offensive coordinator for the Nebraska Cornhuskers–”made over” the Oval Office and Bush in the areas of “fashion, grooming, food and wine, interior design and culture.” In his memoir, Taibbi describes the transformation:

We took Bush away to be fitted for epaulettes… When he came back, he found that we’d painted the White House jet black and covered it with scary vines… The fence-posts around the presidential residence were adorned with human heads, which he quickly recognized, to his delight, as belonging to Democratic Congressmen. The walls on the inside were covered with his presidential portraits, while on the front lawn there was a raging bonfire fueled by portraits of his predecessors. On his desk, we’d left an executive order for the cancellation of elections… We asked him what he thought. He laughed. “This is amazing,” he said. “Laura is going to love this.” Then this little abashed smile came on his face, and he wiped one of his eyes. That was the money shot. The show was pretty much off and running from there.

The show was an immediate hit, and subsequent episodes featured makeovers of the U.S. Constitution, Reed College, Cuba and the Sundance Film Festival, among others. In one of the highest-rated and most rebroadcast programs in the history of American television, Extreme Fascist Makeover spent a half-hour tackling the New York Times–and ultimately, in what must seen as a humorous gesture, left it exactly as it had been.

As always, one of the usual suspects.