'Bushed for Time' — (not available in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea or to Michael Moore) has shot straight to the top of the US Fiction best-seller list since the President's re-election. One anonymous aesthete summed up the book's phenomenal success in these words: "Congress wouldn't act; no publisher's reader would touch it with a six foot blue pencil, so the dyslexic despot signed an executive order that every store in the country had to stock fifty copies or he'd ship 'em out to interrogate 'Islamaist insurgentories in Eyerack."
"That sounds familiar," we commented.
"You betcha sweet ass," agreed a browbeaten bookseller, bitterly. "Bushed for Time' is the worst kind of vanity publishing; a book about public speaking by a public speaker who wouldn't know a preposition from a proposition if it poked him in the eye."

One impressionable young female intern we spoke to was so taken with the tortologous Tyrant's text that she bought eight copies. We asked her why.
"President Bush has restored my faith in American illiteracy," cooed the curvaceous cheerleader (36-24-37). "It’s so totally awesome to read stuff without all those superfluous verbs and pesky past participles getting in the way of his message. I don't have to second-guess his words, actions, or declensions. I may not agree with everything he has wrote, but he has earned my undenying respectation by remonstrating his great diction and dissimulation. I'm real proud he's written this book and enthusiastically enforce his preposition that you don't need to take electrocution lessons to speak properly!"
Betty Bukake, another admiring acolyte of the lexicographical luminary told us breathlessly: "It's not easy to do what Mr Bush has done without falling foul of Freudian slips, neologisms and irregulatory verbs. Bushed for Time is the definate article on public speaking."

We eventually cornered the obtuse orator in the Military section of the bookstore where he took time out from flipping through the pages of a Sylvester Stallone colouring book to tell Utterpants what had prompted him to write the book.
"I love language," began the blundering bombast. "I like to think of it as the epidemic road less travelled by cunnilinguists. For example, I'm taking classes in Amurkan. Amurkan, for the uniliterated, is a 21st century form of gibberish, an arcane tongue having words of only two syllables that eschews regular verbs, or — like, any verbs. Amurkan is fully understood only by Ronald Dumbsfeld and me."

"As I recall, my friend Tony Bliar, who I recently made Honorary Governor of East Texas, was worried about my writing such a specialiatory book. He said I should focus on English. I still hear that quite often from my British friends. But they don't realise I'm speaking in the perfect form and idiom of ancient Amurkan."
"Is it true that you published this book unilaterally against a direct resolution by the United Union of International Lexicographers?" we asked him.

"Look, I didn't get where I am today by beating about the bush. Not that I do beat bush. Well, except that nigger who claims I got her pregnant. But Karl's on her case so she can kiss her bush — I mean, her ass — goodbye. Look, you've got to learn to say yes to the good guys and no to the bad guys. Well those guys who didn't want to publish my book are the bad guys — they're no better than terroristical synthesisers. So I went to the good guys, that's me; and that's that."

"Are you saying that the world's leading lexicographers are part of the axis of Evil?"
"When I was growing up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who the bad guys was. It was them versus us, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who them are, or where they are, but we know they're there, and we will keep on looking for them until we find them, because we're Americans and we know stuff like that."

We assumed the pedantic President was referring to the University of Oxford who have called his book 'the worst waste of trees since Mein Kampf was translated into Esperanto', and asked him point-blank for his response.
"People keep telling me the War on Terror (TM) doesn't seem to resignate with the British people. And I said, you know something? Whether it resignates or not don't matter a hill o' beans to me, because I'm resigned to doing the right thing, and those who don't like it better get resonated to it or resign."

Tough words from a tough turkey, but what did he mean? We tried to pin down the prolix propagandist by asking him if he thought Europe was a threat to the new American imperialism.
"It is hard for the American mind to fathom Europe," vouchsafed the wordy windbag. "A country that allows young girls to have sex at thirteen and young men to smoke afterwards. That's not the American way."
"What exactly are you are afraid of, Mr President?" we asked him.
"We don't know yet," replied the circumlocutory cretin. "What we don't know yet is what we thought we knew when we thought we'd found what we haven't found, and we need to look at that."

We asked why he'd got Tony Bliar to write the foward to 'Bushed for Time.'
"I know your Prime Minister likes to hunt beaver down at Chequers. Sometimes those beavers think they can hide from the Prime Minister. But, eventually, he flushes them out and gets on top of them. And that's exactly why I asked him to introduce my book. It was on the bottom, but now it's on top of the things that were above it when it was beneath them, and the bad guys don't like it."

"So this book is directed at the British reader as much as Americans?" we asked.
"We have a moral obligation to free the British from the tyranny of un-American language," declaimed the disinspirational dictator. "And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos — I mean order out of chaos. But we Americans know how to do that."
"Isn't the US a very much more chaotic country than the UK?" we asked.

"You're misconceiving my meaning," mouthed the meretricious malaproprist. "For every fatal shooting in our great country, there are roughly six non-fatal shootings. And, frankly, that sucks. It's not compatible with the freedoms we Americans enjoy. It's just plain unacceptable, and I'm gonna do something about it, I mean I am doing something about it by sending our brave young men out to places like Britain where they don't have many fatal shootings at all. The great thing about America is that we're Americans. You can't say that about the British. Don't misconstruct me. I like Britain. We got a good, close relationship with Britain. Got a few sticking points, though. We've got an issue on meat, for example. I've made it pretty darn clear to Tony that we need to get this meat issue licked and get British women chewing on more American meat."

"British women are mostly vegetarian," we explained.
"That's because they don't have no balls!" retorted the President."
"Well, that's one thing we can agree on," we said, and legged it to the nearest bar to get plastered with two nice young publisher's readers from Poughkeepsie.

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© 2005 Miranda S Givings & utterpants.co.uk / R220105 / A240605