Excuse Me, Officer, I Speak Jive...

Hello Freedomphiles!  I swear, this story could be from The Onion.  It seems that the squares over at the DEA are trying to find "ebonics translators" so they can understand what is going down in a drug deal.  The Associated Press reports:

The search for translators covers a wide swath of the Southeast, including offices in Atlanta, Washington, New Orleans, Miami and the Caribbean, said Sanders. He said he's uncertain why other regions aren't hiring Ebonics translators, but said there are ongoing investigations in the Southeast that need dedicated Ebonics translators.

Linguists said Ebonics can be trickier than it seems, partly because the vocabulary evolves so quickly.
"A lot of times people think you're just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it," said John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor. "And it's not — it's a big vocabulary. You'll have some significant differences" from English.

Critics worry that the DEA's actions could set a precedent.

"Hiring translators for languages that are of questionable merit to begin with is just going in the wrong direction," said Aloysius Hogan, the government relations director of English First, a national lobbying group that promotes the use of English.

"I'm not aware of Ebonics training schools or tests. I don't know how they'd establish that someone speaks Ebonics," he said. "I support the concept of pursuing drug dealers if they're using code words, but this is definitely going in the wrong direction."

I don't even know where to begin with this.  First of all, is it really that hard to understand black people, yo?  And what is this nonsense about the wrong direction?  It's not like they are proposing a Constitutional Amendment to make Ebonics the National Language. They are just begging for help because they are hopeless geeks, like Patrick Dempsey in Can't Buy Me Love, except with guns and power.

It reminds me of that classic Newsradio episode where Bill McNeil is pimping Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor, and Catherine gets tired of hearing him trying to jive it up, so she gives him a bunch of fake ebonics with which to make a fool of himself on the air. 

I think it'd be awesome if that happened to the DEA.  Can you see an undercover cop talking to some drug kingpin and saying, "Yo, yo, yo, this Rocky Balboa burns straight through hijizzy and makes my brain go kerfluffle.  How many chicken wings and greens for enough weight to get my blizzy-wizzy in the hizzy?"