The Bush Administration sighed a whistle of relief this week with the news that Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a US soldier slain in Iraq who had been standing vigil outside the president’s Texas ranch for over two weeks, had finally gone home to California to care for her ailing mother.

“Clearly, the creator has made his will known,” Bush intoned smugly, as lightning crackled in the background and the lights inside the president’s Crawford, Texas ranch dimmed momentarily.

Sheehan had drawn considerable national media attention to her vigil in recent weeks, becoming the focal point for criticism of the president’s handling of the war in Iraq and making a tidy sum selling lemonade to the massive news crews that had assembled. But her mother’s recent stroke came hot on the heels of news that Sheehan’s husband of 28 years had filed for divorce, causing some religious nuts and the president of the United States to suggest that God doesn’t like her.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” philosophized Bush further, apparently suggesting that Jesus doles out strokes like some kind of celestial blackjack dealer.

When asked if he worried that his comments might be construed as insensitive, the president grew tense for a moment. “I didn’t say ‘bitch’ again, did I? You heard me wrong; I meant ‘beavered.’ ‘Bereavered.’ You know, one of them fitty cent words,” explained Bush, brushing a dozen locusts off his ink blotter.

Critics have taken Bush to task for refusing to meet with Sheehan, who wanted to ask Bush what her son had died to accomplish. With his approval numbers dropping like a concrete blimp, the president opted to change his Sheehan-dealing strategy from his morning ritual of randomly firing his shotgun in the air while shouting “Bitch, get offa my lawn!” to the more politically expedient tactic of ignoring her completely.

This required having a tunnel dug so Bush could exit his Texas ranch without passing by the depressing protestors camped out front.

“It was great, just like The Great Escape,” reminisced Bush, who took no part in the digging of the tunnel but did buy a six-pack of lite beer for the three itinerant laborers who survived the tunnel’s construction and frequent cave-ins.

However, neither the president’s hard-to-get act, nor sending his sloppy drunk brother to drive his pickup truck over roadside memorial crosses in the middle of the night, did anything to shake Sheehan’s resolve. Meanwhile, frequent unexplained events at the President’s ranch in the last week, including blood flowing from the faucets, the Bush twins coming down with catastrophic diarrhea, and the failure of the sun to rise at all on Saturday has some religious scholars and Christians who have actually read the bible questioning if God really is on Bush’s side this time.

But before the commune could address this issue with the president, the Secret Service discovered we’d cornered Bush for a candid in-pantry interview, sans handlers, and burst in with guns drawn. Thankfully for the cause of news, this reporter was able to sneak out with the story’s notes inside a false leg, which drew surprisingly little scrutiny in spite of the low number of three-legged reporters in Texas.