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               | Our Man Offshore
July 30, 2002 -- The Sunny Caribbean (asticles.com) -- On Sunday, tired of looking like a complete diphthong every time he stands in front of a gigantic multicoloured poster (with exhortative snappy key words or bombastic slogans plastered all over ad nauseam like the ones cleverly distracting attention from the hard-pressed CEO's at KPMG and Ernst & Young Christmas parties before they go to jail and/or everyone gets bombed or stoned out of their minds), the President put both his feet down at the same time and told the people who tell him exactly what to say to get their fingers out and polish-up his image throughout the Arab world before the invasion of Iraq. ...or the November US elections, whichever comes first. Senior pundits have long been telling him legitimately that no-one believes a word he says (not even acolyte Tony Blair who says he believes, but deep down doesn't), possibly because he keeps however-legitimately telling the world he has no plans to invade or even bomb and strafe Iraq on his desk. (Editor's Note 1: We've learned they're hidden in his Oval Office refrigerator in a curdled milk carton for tight security reasons). But far more likely as a result of his dwindling poll numbers among staunch Republican Guard Party strongholders nervously eyeing their rapidly-evaporating retirement pension holdings and milk. The response from Mr. Bush's huge trusty staff was amazingly swift and totally not unexpected. Late last night they announced the White House plumbers and carpenters have been instructed to transform the temporary broom closet used since the last one is still under heavy FBI seal until it gets recreated meticulously at the Smithsonian Institution into a permanent, fully staffed "Office of Global Communications" to coordinate the administration's foreign policy message and supervise America's image abroad. The reason: it is especially in the Arab-speaking world where, according to yet other senior unnamed crack officials, a completely-unjustified US bias towards Israel is perceived notwithstanding the $1.9 billion in cash and nonnegotiable Enron, Adelphia, AOL Time Warner and WorldCom stock and the 39 F-16 low-flying "Apartment, Marriage and Bunker Buster" stealth fighters given to Tel Aviv only last Tuesday. ...that is, when unfairly compared to the 100,000 Ronald McDonald "$1 off any Big Mac before Noon" coupons and the two 1972 'driven by an old lady from Pasadena' Ford Pintos grudgingly handed over to the badly-uniformed ragtag Palestine Authority at Camp David in 1998 with much fanfare. Going much further than anyone expected and certainly much further than the last occupant in any of the many White House secret closets, the announcement caught even the most suspicious and jaded high Democratic Party leaders looking even more benumbed, dumbfounded and (it's been long suspected in not only a couple of cases) impotent than they generally appear involuntarily. As a high presidential advisor, fearing for his or her job and caught in the headlights between Colin Powell's and Donald Rumsfeld's gas-guzzling Mitsashimi Emperor Hirohito SUV headlights, said (under a guarantee of complete impunity), "Our first task is to release information to Al-Jizz-Eerie cunningly timed and disguised to counter mounting world opposition to a full scale (or half-scale or mock or half-mock because who really knows anymore, so many secret plans, each one more insane than the other, have been leaked) invasion. "Even though you know and I know storming Iraq will leave many more uniformed personnel dead and wounded than unsuspecting civilians celebrating marriages late into the starry Afghan night the Republican Party leaves us no alternative but to press ahead if we want to win again almost-legitimately in 2004. "Once we get our ducks in a row and allow enough time for State and Justice Department and Pentagon officials, Senators, Congresswomen (and -men) and Governors (past and present) to get draft dispensations or immigration visas and one-way tickets to Canada and Sweden for their teenage sons and daughters, we'll go into much greater detail. "But for today let it suffice to say we'll be using the old 'he who giveth modestly with one hand taketh largely with the other' ploy first perfected by Count 'Quickly' Metternich and most recently and most successfully by still-at-large crack Enron executives. "Simply stated, it means if we have to we'll concede 'producing weapons of mass destruction' and 'killing your own people' no longer qualify as legitimate reasons for invading anywhere. Let alone another country." (Editor's Note 2: After all, who isn't doing one or the other these days? Or in the case of Texas, both?) "We'll use some other reasons, including the incredibly clumsy stock manipulation Saddam Hussein made as a mere stripling when he bought the Baghdad Senators for almost nothing and moved them to Basra before selling them to Aenron (Iraq's former largest energy futures company) that suspiciously declared bankruptcy a mere day after all the executives parked their babe-magnet oceangoing yachts outside their beach and/or desert front villas in Kuwait, Qatar and Oman."   Copyright © 2002, David Marsden.Copyright © 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Read our privacy policy. Contact us. ISSN No. 1523-1690 | |||