President tells nation,
'I'm sure something
will pop into my head'
By John Breneman
Make no mistake. Gathering threat. Must not waver. Stay
the course.
His Tuesday night press conference was going along just fine.
The president had successfully ducked one question about whether
he'd made any "errors in judgment" and dodged another
about "personal responsibility for September 11th."
He in-your-faced the nation by playing the dunce, twice,
when asked clearly and directly why he and the vice president
insist on appearing before the 9/11 Commission together instead
of individually.
George W. Bush had wisely chosen to field questions from
the East Room of the White House instead of from the deck
of an aircraft carrier in front of a giant "Mission Accomplished"
banner. And when Uncle Dick picked out the evening's attire,
the famous military flightsuit was tucked deep in the White
House play closet.
President Bush did not waver from his message while he stayed
the course. There was no talk of outsourcing the fighting
to India if the violence does not abate.
He even answered a question on the minds of many. "Mr.
President, who will we be handing the Iraqi government over
to on June 30th?"
BUSH (actual words): "We'll find that out soon. That's
what Mr. Brahimi is doing. He's figuring out the nature of
the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over."
See, Brahimi is on it. He's gonna let us know. No truth to
the rumor Cheney plans to sell the strife-torn nation to Halliburton
for an undisclosed sum and some quid pro quo to be named later.
Once the entity is identified and order restored it will
be safe to implement the president's time-tested economic
development strategy -- distribute generous tax breaks to
the rich and open the region to exploitation by corporate
friends with addresses in the Bahamas.
Some of the questions were kind of tough but stuff kept coming
out of his mouth. "Now is the time and Iraq is the place."
And the smirk stayed tucked away, at least until it leaked
out when he said the oil revenue stream there is "pretty
darn significant."
But trouble loomed ahead, a grave and gathering question.
Mr. President: "After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake
be
and what lessons have learned from it?"
BUSH (actual words): "I wish you'd have given me this
written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. John,
I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've
done it better this way or that way. You know, I just -- I'm
sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of
this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to
come up with answer, but it hadn't yet.
"
"I hope -- I don't want to sound like I have made no
mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't -- you just
put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on
my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
And don't get him started on those weapons of mass destruction.
"They could still be there. They could be hidden, like
the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," some of
Col. Gadhafi's leftovers found in Libya.
Stay the course. Hypothetical linguistic analysis reveals
that President Bush favors the word "course" because
it subconsciously reminds him of country club living and shooting
golf with his dad and that he favors the term "stay the
course" because it's stuck in his head from hearing Dana
Carvey poke fun at his pop.
"Stay the course" means never having to say you're
sorry, never having to answer any question you don't want
to.
Stay the course, and you'll probably find those weapons after
all. You may even get that parade for the American liberators
you promised yourself way back when.
Make no mistake. Gathering threat. Dangerous man. Stay the
course?
Easter
Bunny held for questioning
By John Breneman
U.S. counter-terrorism officials would neither confirm nor
deny that the Easter Bunny is being held for questioning about
a clandestine overnight operation that exposed the nation's
children to countless tons of teeth-rotting weapons of mass
confection on Sunday.
But sources close to the floppy-eared holiday icon claim
he is being interrogated in a cramped mesh-bottom cage in
Guantanamo Bay. The charges: periodontal terrorism and 52
million counts of contributing to the obesity of a minor.
The alleged incarceration of the Easter Bunny (aka Peter
Cotton-Tail) has already become politicized. Critics charge
that the Bush administration was slow to guard against the
threat that gut-busting quantities of chocolate might be deployed,
on a sacred religious holiday no less, despite a March 6 Presidential
Daily Briefing (PDB) entitled "Easter Bunny determined
to strike in U.S."
"We should have been on pastel alert," said White
House heckler Adolf W. Bush. "The president should have
been more vigilant about the national obesity epidemic that
makes our soft underbelly particularly vulnerable to, say,
a giant milk chocolate rabbit, fistfuls of jelly beans or
a gaggle of glistening marshmallow peeps."
But National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on
Oprah, Regis and Saturday Night Live to defend the president,
saying, "No one could have imagined terrorists using
candy as a weapon."
Rice admitted there was some heightened chatter in the months
leading up to Easter, but most of it non-specific fragments
like "Hippity hop bunny trail," "dye, eggs,
dye" and "mother of all chocolate Jesuses."
Santa
eyed for Cabinet post
Jesus Christ, box-office superstar
A day at the 9/11 Commission
What
did Bush and Cheney say?
A comic bomb:
Bush slays 'em with WMD gag
By John Breneman
With a comic touch as deft as a Baghdad bombing raid, President
Bush reduced the side-splitting Iraq weapons of mass destruction
fiasco to a punchline.
The Commander-in-Cheek laughed off the world's concern about
non-existent WMDs at the 60th annual Radio & Television
Correspondents' Association dinner Wednesday night.
War
on Iraq
U.S. death toll: hundreds
Cost: untold billions
Bush's standup routine: priceless.
Too bad the families of soldiers killed in Iraq don't get
the joke.
If you missed it, President Bush was showing funny pictures
and cracking jokes about them when up popped a photo of him
looking under a desk. "Those weapons of mass destruction
must be somewhere," quipped the White House wagster.
"Nope, no weapons over there
Maybe under here."
The bit unwittingly lampooned Bush's cluelessness that his
phony weapons bluster for a war that has now claimed hundreds
of U.S. lives might not be the best fodder for cornball humor
from a leader regarded in much of the world as a malevolent
moron.
Sources say Bush is planning followup jokes about some of
his other wacky stunts, like tagging the U.S. Constitution
with anti-gay grafitti, giving phony $4 billion cost estimates
for the $5.5 billion Medicare bill and sporting a flightsuit
for his side-splitting "Mission Accomplished" caper.
"Sheer comic genius," raved the respected comedian
Carrot Top, who is helping the president build an arsenal
of one-liners and witticisms of mass destruction.
John Kerry, after consulting with political humorist Al Franken,
issued a statement calling Bush "a big fat idiot."
Related story:
President
sends Wile E. Coyote on mission to nab bin Laden
Kerry
claims proof Bush lied about Iraq
By John Breneman
A John Kerry supporter claims to have conclusive photographic
evidence that President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. The picture was allegedly taken Saturday in Orlando,
Fla., during a 15-minute Bush stopover to bag $200,000 each
from a bunch of businessmen who want a piece of him.
As the president began fielding a question about Iraq, his
nose reportedly appeared to sprout from his face, reaching
nearly three inches as he continued on about the economy and
the real cost of Medicare.
A leading Democratic spin doctor who analyzed an X-ray of
the image said the prognosis is grim, possibly terminal, for
the Bush presidency. Dr. Dawn Key said the malignant fib-nose
may leave the president with as little as eight months to
lead.
Democratic spin doctor says X-ray of malignant
fib-nose shows Bush may have as little as eight months
to lead.
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But Dr. Ella Funt, a respected GOP spin doctor, dismissed
that as a partisan diagnosis and said the photo was probably
doctored, like the one Republican supporters were distributing
of John Kerry and Jane Fonda.
Furthermore, she said, the president's tendency to fudge
the truth could not possibly cause such extreme enlargement
of the proboscis, unless of course the president was actually
a Pinocchio-like marionette, manipulated by, say, Donald Rumsfeld
and Dick Cheney.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, who complained
Thursday he was "misled" about Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction, said the hapless marionette theory
would help explain why Bush seemed so oblivious to the apparent
Halliburton conflict of interest fiasco.
Kerry, meanwhile, boasted that dozens of world leaders called
to tell him they want Bush out, a few even mocking the president's
own cowboy-speak by adding, "dead or alive."
However, a GOP political analyst said the White House is
unconcerned. Bush's standing with his conservative base remains
strong, especially now that he's reversed his previous position
and called for an anti-gay marriage
amendment to the Constitution.
The American people, he said, won't be fooled by the Democratic
tactic of calling the Bush administration dishonest about
everything from job projections and the deficit to WMD claims
and Medicare (both the phony news video and the part about
threatening to fire actuary Richard S. Foster if he told the
truth about the pesky $1.5 cost overrun).
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