MAYDAY!! Mayday!! Rendition perdition!! RDed by TD!! The Wheels of Fire Tsunami Express mission to Peoria has flamed out bigtime. I thought me and my Tsunami homies were headed to a performance at the HMO of HMO Golf Tournaments celebrating the financial nuptials between Our Lady of United and The Blessed Queen of Discounted Medicare Stuff-aka Pacificare. After ditching the Shaqster and 50, we were in a jovial hiphop mood-Willy J Clinton and Georgy H were doing an impromptu rap about Sticking It to the Sixty-Fives, which included some very saucy language directed at The Olds, as they referred to their AARP Brothers and Sisters.

Their Rhythmic Rapture was rudely interrupted by the following chilling announcement on the Wheels of Fire intercom:

"Welcome to The TD RD Victory Tour, sponsored by our friends and fellow casino moguls-The Choctaw Resort and Condo Chiefs. We will be landing soon at a safe place in Ankara for a little R and R."

"Tommy-you Texas dirtbag. I paid for this airtime, so take your Indian brothers and butt out of my rendition commando raid. George Hermann, stop rapping and drag your suspicious, droopy buns to the cockpit. Condy has some questions to ask you."

I will not bore you with the gory details, but it turns out that Babs had been intercepting certain communications between GH and what sounded like an old Iraqi high-school flame. This "communicado was subject to multiple potential RDs-that means RenDitted to all you non-Midland High School graduates-interpretations that could have been counterintuitive to the interests of my fellow oil and gas patriots" according to the Imperial Order signed by George Walker authorizing Babs to tap his phone. GW dispatched Tommy DeeLay, as GW likes to call him, and his R&R Queen-Condy Rice-to confront George Hermann in a way that would extract the most information in the shortest amount of time. As GH found out, R&R stands for rendition and redaction, which is a polite term for securing your confession and retraction of your sinful behavior.

I do not know what happened to George Hermann, as we left him bound and gagged on the Ankara runway while TD and Condy argued over whose definition of torture they were going to use. Condy kept insisting that full body contact with or without major organ damage was permissible while TD took the Testosterone High Road stance, which provided some nebulous safeguards-not to include a hard-shelled cup device-for below-the-belt activities. All I can tell you is that Babs kept egging them on, and they themselves had one hell of a physical brouhaha that would have made Dick Cheney proud of both of them. GH also tried to get his 2 cents' worth into the mix, but nobody could understand his muffled screams so we just tuned him out.

As William Jefferson so aptly put it, "better him than me," as we sailed blissfully through German airspace headed once again toward Peoria and the warm embrace of the United-Pacific PPO Tribe.