Penman X. Rodd vs. The Stench

A distinguished journalist has attempted to commit suicide after a head injury sustained in a freak accident. The US Report has the exclusive.

Penman X. Rodd may be the most influential journalist you never heard of. Rodd is the big rod on staff (according to two females who do not want to be identified for obvious reasons) at The Washington Papers, a print only publication with subscriptions starting at $5,000 a year. TWP is popular with lobbyists, select politicians and entertainers.

It’s rumored that Madonna reads every word of it, although she is challenged by the reading level of the content, as evidenced by her recent advice to supporters to vote for the “Black Muslim” in the White House.

TWP is print only. You won’t find it on the Web.

Rodd’s breakdown began as a routine day. On the evening of  Sept. 11, Rodd was having drinks with friends at a Washington bar. Rodd is a Twitter freak, and as soon as he saw messages about the embassy attack, he knew a big story was brewing.

Rodd tossed a $20 bill on the table and ran for the door despite a fellow reporter from NBC calling out, “Hey, Rodd, that won’t cover it!”

Rodd told him to shove it—he’d settle up with them later. Unfortunately the people at the table knew that wouldn’t happen because Rodd routinely dodges the check. Servers always avoid Rodd because he is a one-percent tipper.

As Rodd fled the tab, he barreled his way through the exit door and scurried to find a cab. The next thing he knew, Rodd was face down on the pavement—he had actually collided with a homeless man carrying a “Forward” sign.

The good news is that after a day in the hospital, Rodd was discharged with a few bruises and a hematoma on the right side of his head. The pain pills the doc gave him were taking the edge off the pain, especially if he took two instead of one. Rodd now remembers wondering why every woman he encountered seemed beautiful, even the bald headed 75-lb. receptionist with a nose ring at the office.

Rodd’s co-workers became alarmed from the moment he returned to work after the injury.

Rodd walked in, set his latte down on his desk, looked at all his coworkers’ cubicles and began to shout, “The stench!”

Rodd kept yelling it so loud the teenagers working the pita counter at the deli next door heard him.

Even as he shouted, Rodd started banging away on his laptop with the eagerness he normally showed only when engaged in a twosome after hours and after a whole lot of Scotch. Rodd always was a great bi-tasker.

Curious, Rodd’s editor tiptoed over and began to read the copy. The editor’s face got red as the fist on a Solidarity poster. He  grabbed Rodd’s shoulder and told him to kill his tale!

Later, Rodd admitted to a counselor in the hospital that the editor even threatened him with loss of benefits and immediate dismissal if the story were to leak.

Rodd later told The US Report he had it on good authority from an Obama insider that one of the special gardeners helping First Lady Obama with her veggie plot was an al Qaeda member. But there was more.

There was also a very tawdry story about one of Obama’s relatives in Kenya and a special sheep named Soup in a Can. Rodd lusted to write that one.

Maybe it was the lick on the head, or maybe the rapture Rodd experienced with a certain redhead he met at the corner market one night after he’d run out of tapenade, but Rodd suddenly had this surge in his heart, a swelling sense that it was time to come clean, to rediscover the passion he felt when he was in high school and busted the smoking ring in the media center—one of the smokers was a guidance counselor and that really enraged Rodd. That was Rodd’s first investigative piece if you didn’t count the debate team captain in the back seat of his Volkswagen after a really big match when he was 16.

Rodd was frustrated. Here he was sitting on one of the biggest stories in his lifetime, and no one would run it.

He said, for a split second, he understood how frustrated the Breitbart team must have felt when they discovered Obama’s literary agent, presumably with the president’s blessing, had circulated a bio that claimed Obama was born in Kenya. Rodd hadn’t even acknowledged the contradictory information—plus he had made too many “birther” jokes to backtrack now.

Rodd knocked on door after door, but no major media would take his story. One skewered him for his “anonymous sources.” Rodd said he was told, “Anonymous is great for national security leaks, but you know we can’t run a political piece on a Democrat without naming the source.”

Rodd tried to argue; he got nowhere.

Self-loathing set in. Rodd realized he’d lived a lie for so long he wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him upside the head with a smart phone.

Rodd realized he missed the truth. At this point in his life, possibly because of the pain pills and his injury, Rodd realized his mortality. He realized truth would not come to him no matter what he did—he was beyond redemption.

 He went back to his apartment, grabbed his pain pills and the bottle of Chivas Regal Royal Salute. That had been a gift from a patron of Obama from the president’s college days who was grateful to TWP for helping Obama get elected.

Rodd arranged himself on his Egyptian cotton sheets. He popped a handful of pills and began to defile the Scotch by drinking it straight out of the bottle.

Rodd might have been lost to us forever, but for one thing that proves God loves even corrupt reporters.

Rodd’s life was saved by a female reporter from another publication whose name we dare not speak but whose big cheese politics guy said the Republican candidates in the primary were unworthy of “the most talented journalists covering them.”

Rodd had actually had an encounter with the female a week before his head injury—both of them hadn’t had sex for a couple days and they decided to just do the friends with benefits thing. The female had left her retainer (she was a lot younger than Rodd) in Rodd’s nightstand.

She had put off going to pick it up—she was still embarrassed by what happened because Rodd didn’t perform as expected that night, he blamed her for it and they’d parted on impolite terms. But her teeth were shifting and she needed that retainer, so she headed over to his apartment after his co-workers told her where to find him.

The first thing she noticed as she got to the door was the stench. Alarmed, she ran to get the superintendent who unlocked the door for her.

For reasons unknown, Rodd had decided to smear his entire body with two pounds of blue cheese ahead of his suicide. No one will ever know why, but it’s generally agreed among the “most-talented” reporters covering politics that he was temporarily out of his mind. Rodd told the EMS guys he thought the cheese was whipped cream topping.

An ambulance came and Rodd is now ensconced at a tony rehab center paid for by the Obama donor who had given Rodd the $10,000 bottle of Scotch.

Rodd reached out to conservative bloggers in hopes of getting his exposé some attention.

An orderly told The US Report Rodd isn’t doing too well.

“All he wants to do is watch regular network news and he just lies in his bed repeating over and over, ‘The Stench! The Stench’. He gets totally unmanageable when Diane Sawyer comes on.”

The orderly said all access to whipped topping is currently being denied, at least until Rodd gets stronger.

Rodd isn’t the first reporter this election has gotten to and he won’t be the last.

The big cheese writer at the publication where the one-night-stand-who-saved-Rodd’s-life works appears to be suffering the same condition, albeit without the head injury.

(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Sept. 26, 2012)