Three Art Brew Columns

My hero, Art Brew, was a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic, an ecotourism specialist, and an adventure travel correspondent for outdoor magazines. Finally, he was a roving correspondent, some say raving correspondent, for the L. A. (Lower Alabama) Free Press, driving along the Redneck Riviera between the Flora-Bama Lounge and Nut-All Rise, seeing the sights and talking to people.

I included three columns he wrote about Bush et al in Bukowski Never Did This.

Slap Out, Alabama (YU)--Art Brew, Miami Bureau Chief, YU News Service, a parody news and disinformation syndicate, a trained private investigator (PI), and author of many, many PI (post-inaccrochable) novels, was asked for his take on the famous rug-burn incident, where President Bush choked on a pretzel while watching football on television, fainted, and abraded his cheek when he fell face-first to the rug in his private quarters in the White House, while his wife, First Lady Laura Bush, was in another room, and the Presidential Dogs, Spot and Barney, revived him, licking his face with their tongues.

"The First Lady, Laura Bush, in another room, and the Presidential Dogs, Spot and Barney, reviving him, licking his face, with their tongues, are the key," Brew said.

"I believe," he said, "the president was watching porn movies on television, and having sex with a pretzel, when, thinking he heard the first lady's approach, and fearing he would be caught flagrante delicto, he swooned dead away, from fright, and was revived, in the nick of time, by Spot and Barney, whereupon he was able to put his dick back in his pants in the nick of time, unlike his unfortunate predecessor in the office, Bill Clinton."

"Anyone who has had sex around animals," Brew said, "with a pretzel knows it causes them to salivate, and lick, as they become aroused, and want to `join in the fun.'"

"He's damned lucky he woke up in time," Brew said. "Your dick becomes engorged with blood, the pretzel cuts the circulation to your brain off, and you faint. It's like autoerotic asphyxiation, only with a fetish object. These cases are well known to writers of PI novels."

"Imagine if the first lady had walked in on him in time," Brew said. "He'd be known as Old Pretzel Dick, and not for the sharp right turn, or bend his penis is rumored to take," Brew said.

A spokesman from the Office of the Press Secretary (OOPS) denied that alcohol was involved "in any way" with the incident. As no one had asked whether it was, or assumed it was, since the president quit drinking the day after his 40th birthday and has been on the wagon since, the OOPS Czar's statement aroused more suspicion than it allayed.

The OOPS Czar declined to comment on whether the president's penis curves to the right.

"CD stands for Chocolate Drop," the OOPS Czar said. "Not Crooked Dick."

Crooked Dick is uncomfortably close to Richard Nixon's sobriquet of Slippery Dick, often transcribed Tricky Dick by the media, who can't tell the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

In an unrelated story, the OOPS Czar said the first lady had no plans to become spokesperson for a drive to heighten awareness of the dangers posed to adolescent males (15 - 25) by Autoerotic Asphyxiation (AEA) Syndrome, who experience heightened sexual pleasure from the decreased flow of blood to their brains by choking themselves while masturbating.

Or fucking a pretzel.

Slap Out, Alabama (YU)--President Bush's Acronym Czar announced today that progress has been made in the administration's Middle East peace plan by adoption of an acronym for its Roadmap for Peace (RFP). It is hoped that RFP will join WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and COW (coalition of the willing), and not be confused with Request for Proposal, in which competing firms are invited to bid against each other and show they are qualified to carry out a lucrative government contract, if awarded it.

Competitive bidding has been done away with, in favor of giving lucrative government contracts to campaign contributors, by Bush, the first MBA president, or first CEO president, who is doing for America what Ken Lay did for Enron.

Maybe cashiered employees can use what's left of their 401k accounts to upsize to a big order of fries, as soon as the administration's job-stimulation tax cuts create hundreds of new low-paying jobs with no benefits for cashiered employees whose unemployment benefits have run out after one 13-week extension.

One acronym that didn't catch hold was AEA, for autoerotic asphyxiation syndrome, in which the president passed out fucking a pretzel while watching X-rated movies alone at the White House and abraded his cheek with a rug burn before the first dog and rabbit, Molly and Spot, woke him up by licking his face. The administration put an embargo on the use of that one, banning anyone who used it from presidential press conferences, where, if they didn't have access, they were replaced at their paper by someone who did.

Nor did the first lady have any plans to become spokesperson for a drive to heighten awareness of the dangers posed to adolescent males (15 - 25) by autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA) syndrome, who experience heightened sexual pleasure from the decreased flow of blood to their brains by choking themselves while masturbating or fucking a pretzel.

In an unrelated development, Bill O'Reilly was reduced to calling Al Franken an idiot and telling him to shut up, on a panel at the Book Expo America (BEA) convention, where both of them were plugging upcoming books.

Molly Ivins, who was on the panel, said O'Reilly was sandbagged. He hadn't seen the dust jacket of Franken's book, about liars, and lying, on which he was pictured as one of the liars, lying, until Franken showed it to him before an audience on C-SPAN2 of millions of avid book readers, and was "pissed off to the max."

I can't remember if Laura Bush was public libraries or public education, both of which have been gutted by the president's budget shortfalls. Possibly it was mental health or the arts, also gutted.

Maybe it was literacy for adults who cannot read.

Let them watch television.

People who don't read missed a good chance to see O'Reilly hoist on his own petard.

Later, on a call-in segment in which Ivins and Franken participated, but which O'Reilly was unable to attend, having a previous engagement, Franken said that when O'Reilly had someone on his program to represent the other side he got "a professor from Florida with lazy-eye who's never been on television before."

Ivins agreed O'Reilly was a bully.

Meanwhile the Roadmap for Peace was going ahead, as we backed one side and ignored the legitimate grievances of the other, a proven recipe for success in peacemaking efforts in international disputes of long-standing, as Professor Chomsky observed, later that night, in an in-depth interview with Brian Lamb viewers who do not read might have missed, watching women in bikinis eating spiders on a competing television program, the one the president likes to watch, to keep in touch with the plebiscite who elected him by a landslide in 2000.

God didn't appoint Bush president, Franken said. Clarence Thomas did.

Viewers of the first Bush-Kerry debate noticed that President Bush had a transceiver implanted in his back, like a Pacemaker. He also had a gag-buzzer in his hand for shaking hands with Kerry and "goosing" him. Kerry didn't even flinch. What a cold fish.

What they didn't see was a wire running up President Bush's neck, behind his external ear, and into his ear canal with a tiny speaker on it, to broadcast the signal he was receiving, and being coached by, into the booming empty cavern-chamber of his head.

President Bush was being guided by a Higher Power, on the planet Venus, Who gave him the answers, over radio waves, to questions in the debate.

What President Bush did not know was that Satan, on the planet Mars, was jamming God's broadcasts. This explains his aphasia and "confused-chimp expression," as James Fallows put it. The Forces of Darkness, Spiritual Wickedness in High Places, and Principalities and Powers (Satan gets oil money and unpolished rice money from Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the so-called Axis of Evil) had combined to foil God's plan to help His man in Washington win.

Damn Satan's eyes! Or, in this case, his jammer.

It's no wonder President Bush looked confused and angry. He had practiced using the apparatus at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and God came through fine, down there, where the humidity is low and the temperature is high, and there are no distractions like skeptics, an audience not vetted by President Bush's handlers, or an opponent who answered him back, and was not taken in by slogans, repetition, and right-wing Jesuitical casuistry.

Imagine--an opponent who had studied the playbook, watched the game films, and spotted a weakness. It was like Joe Namath picking the Baltimore Colts' defense apart in the Superbowl. And predicting it.

One doctor offered an explanation for President Bush's linguistic awkwardness, frankly stupefied expression, and long, embarrassing pauses: PSD.

Presenile dementia.

He has Alzhimer's Disease, like his father, and President Ford.

I don't see how a doctor can diagnose AD without examining the patient. And President Bush is known to have avoided taking a physical exam to get out of bad situations in the past. How can you make a man who doesn't want to take a physical?

I noticed that President Bush's lips were moving. And he wasn't reading.

He was talking to himself.

Luckily, I can read lips.

President Bush was desperately reciting The Senility Prayer to himself, like a mantra:

God, grant me the senility to ignore the questions I don't know the answer to, the aggression to jump on the ones I do, and the dumb luck to hit on the difference accidentally.