Just a passing thought. I saw the raspberry left behind by the epiglottal struggle with a pretzel. I heard the jokes and laughed. I was happy to see the world remember that dubya is, in fact, a moron.

Then I remembered one of the scary things I heard the first days dubya was in office, the first days we as a nation laughed at his stupidity. That he (or his experienced cabinet) could essentially slide anything by us, and that wouldn't be news. News was blundered pronunciations during speeches on education; news was not the implications of the new policies on children and on their teachers.

My suspicions were put on high alert when the story broke that dubya had issued an executive order halting the release of Reagan's Presidential Records. The Presidential Records Act (passed after our nation endured the secrecy and treachery of Nixon's administration) mandates that a given president's Presidential Records be released 12 years after his last term. Not now. Not any more. The cynics in the world attribute dubya's action to the possible embarrassment of his cabinet/VP/etc., most of whom happened to be pretty active under Reagan--during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Me, I've heard (but I've not been able to corroborate) that Reagan had an obsession with aliens (nice that Reagan rhymes with alien), that he wished that they would land and try to take over the earth. This would, in Reagan's mind, bring a quick and unquestioned, undebated end to the Cold War. Papers that evidence this pipe-dream are what I most want to see.

(As an aside, I'd like to get it down in writing, the following thought that I've often expressed during parties of the cocktail persuasion: the Republican party really should bring Reagan out much as the athletic community brings out M. Ali. For all the grand-old-days talk of Reagan's administration, his vision of extreme government reduction, for all this talk, They never bring him out to light the olympic torch...)

Anyways, so I was having all these paranoid ideas and whatnot, and then I see the new strawberry that was growing on the president's face, and then I remembered: I've seen this before. A couple of months ago, the president had some skin cancers removed. More strawberries. (Did I call them raspberries before? That was wrong...)

And then, still paranoid, I remembered something about Osama Bin Laden. I remembered that they wouldn't broadcast video of the man, lest his dress, hand gestures, or words contain some hidden signals, signals to his operatives to "do the big job" or something like that. I remembered seeing Hard Copy or some similarly much-maligned spectacle of a news broadcast announcing that the hidden message may be communicated by the presence or absence of a ritual dagger in his dress.

And then, still paranoid, it occurred to me that our President, George W. Bush, had himself possibly made use of this steganographic technology. ("Himself," of course, is not limited to the physical and psychic boundaries of the entity that is "George W. Bush." I am merely attempting to construct the type of evil mastermind analogous to "Osama Bin Laden," an oversimplification that is a bungled attempt to take advantage of our natural story-structure, in which evil is personified in an individual with superhuman capabilities and resources. By "himself," I am of course refering to the Reagan-leftovers, an entire cabinet of evil masterminds.)

And so here I present initial evidence that the constellations of facial abrasions presented presidentially worldwide are, in fact, hidden messages. More than that, dear readers. I here posit that, and you may feel free to quote me on this, THE MARKS ON THE PRESIDENT'S FACE ARE MAPS, possibly used to communicate targets for military actions in the Southern Asian Theater of the War Against Terrorism.

Then again, we must remember that our President is a moron. In which case the facial maps, placed with surgical precision using GPS laser technology, are, in fact, hidden messages to Reagan's aliens: "You should land here to vote in the 2000 Presidential Elections."

(yeah, the dermal anomalies aren't properly placed in Dade--did I mention that dubya is a moron?)

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!

Cheney Gets In The Act--1/30/2002

When I wrote the above article, I thought nothing of it. Surely it was a joke, and not even a particularly funny one. But the proof, I am afraid my friends, has been delivered. For now the VP has shown his own scarred face, and the evidence is nothing less than damnable.

Amidst the news and the accusations and the curiosity, playful or pernicious, of us all to know the truth: Who Knew What When. I am, of course, talking about the Enron scandal. Today, Congress sued the White House to release the names of persons invited to contribute to Pres. Bush's energy policy. Today Vice President Cheney, newly 61, appeared and spoke briefly on the matter.

But the pictures spoke more, my friendly reader. Cheney sported yet another Bush-administration steganographic facial abrasion, this one--we are told--was the marked result of a tumble with the family dog, this one showing exactly where We the People were going to get screwed: