At a public appearance yesterday, Bill Clinton said he was “dumbfounded” by Karl Rove’s recent comments about Hillary Clinton’s health. “First they said she faked her concussion and now they say she’s auditioning for a part on ‘The Walking Dead,’” the former president said.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t the only zombie reference in the news yesterday.
According to a report in Foreign Policy magazine, the Defense Department … maintains a disaster preparation document called “CONOP 8888,” which in fact is a zombie survival plan. It was developed to train commanders in the art of strategizing for a catastrophe.Foreign Policy bills it as a “how to guide for military planners” trying to save the population from an onslaught of the undead.The zombie offensive is part of what the DoD calls “fictional contingency planning guidance” that asks military commanders to come up with a blueprint to “preserve non-zombie humans from the threat posed by a zombie horde,” Foreign Policy reported, citing an unclassified Pentagon document.
In the document’s “disclaimer section,” the author of the report added that “this plan was not actually designed as a joke.” (If this is a joke that’s fooled everyone, some folks went to a lot of trouble, writing a dense, 31-page memo obtained by Foreign Policy magazine.)
The same report also references chicken zombies — or “CZs” — that the Pentagon says are quite real.
“Although it sounds ridiculous, this is actually the only proven class of zombie that actually exists,” the plan explains. Though I’ve never heard of this, the report says chickens have been known to be euthanized only to claw back later. “CZs are simply terrifying to behold and are likely only to make people become vegetarians in protest to animal cruelty,” CONOP 8888 notes.
Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s never heard of real-life chicken zombies.
All of this, by the way, comes just a few weeks after a Florida lawmaker introduced actual legislative language that would allow residents to carry concealed firearms in the event of a “zombie apocalypse.”
The lawmaker, state Senator Dwight Bullard (D), later explained, “For me, as laughable as the amendment might seem, it’s equally laughable that people who haven’t gone through the proper training, the background check, the license to carry — we’re saying because of a hurricane or flooding or sinkhole, these individuals have gone from gun owners to concealed carry permit holders. I’d argue a crisis is probably the last instance in which you want someone who is not a concealed permit holder to carry a weapon.”
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."