merica awoke this week to find itself trapped in a shitty Groundhog Day nightmare, thanks to a recent AP poll showing that if the election were held today, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry would tie, with human Muppet Ralph Nader playing the spoiler once again by garnering 6 percent of the vote. These results were eerily and shittily similar to the 2000 Presidential election, when Bush won despite losing the popular vote, thanks in part to Nader siphoning off liberal voters and Bush’s brother Jeb taking a big, wet crap on the Constitution to ensure his brother would carry the crucial state of Florida.

Within moments of the Associated Press poll results being made public, Americans everywhere were comparing their feelings of nauseating year-2000 déjà vu to the 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a news weatherman doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. How this phenomenon might be possible for an entire nation on a four-year scale is not yet understood, though faerie magic has yet to be completely disproved. Regardless of the cause, non-Republicans everywhere agree that America needs to make some kind of major soul-searching change to prevent waking up in 2005 to hear “I Got You Babe� playing on clock radios across the country.

“Fuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!� fumed an epileptically frustrated Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe upon hearing the results of the poll, a replay of the 2000 election searing his brain stem like a cattle brand. Similar sentiments echoed across the nation this week as Democrats and the non-rich envisioned a bizarre replay of the last presidential election, with Gore being swapped out for Democratic nominee John Kerry like some kind of bad Hollywood script for a time-traveling comedy.

“I don’t know if Kerry will be able to pull off what Gore did,� mused confident-sounding political pundit Prance Nancley. “Al Gore could have won that election in his sleep, after all he was running against a Mr. Potato Head doll. But Gore still somehow managed to drop the ball and kick it all the way down the street, allowing so-called adult George W. to sneak into the White House while the door was ajar and Gore was off looking for his ball. I don’t think Kerry has that kind of comedy in him. He is rather dull.�

Still, the possible scenario of an election repeat has haunted more than a few Democrat dreams this week, with Kerry taking the place of Gore as the respectable, though thoroughly boring democratic hopeful who somehow loses to Bush on a technicality, after Florida’s governor declares that blacks don’t have the right to vote in his state any more.

The lone encouraging note in all this is that according to the same AP poll, politics aren’t the only area in which America is trapped in a loop of déjà vu, as the AP cites “current� top-grossing films The Grinch, Cast Away and Mission Impossible 2, and has ‘N Sync, Santana and Eminem topping the album charts, which clearly isn’t true.

Is it?

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While your average American gives no thought to the complicated world of politics, concerned more with trivialities such as "Will my job survive the year?" and "How can I afford to keep my family medically insured?" the think-tankers in the upper echelons of the U.S. government are asking only one question: "Is Saddam Hussein alive, and if so, where is he?" Yes, if you check, that's technically only one question, hence the single question mark.

The short answer is: No. But wait! Before you think I've become boring in my old age, I haven't cracked your brain with the baseball bat of conspiracy yet, and I assure you there is more to the Saddam Hussein story than you've considered before. And always more than they're telling you.

The reason Saddam Hussein is no longer alive is that he was never alive. Saddam Hussein, was, is, and always has been nothing more than a computer program. Surprised? Good, I say. You don't think I hold off on telling you all this shit simply because it slipped my mind, do you? I get my jollies watching your jaw drop, friend.

Has anyone ever seen the movie Virtuosity? Of course not. Some would chalk this up to the film being predictable and fairly empty of any real enjoyment, but I say this underestimates the part played by the American government to make the movie go unseen. The film is a roundabout way to propose that many of our society's villains are nothing more than distracting computer creations, and it took a lot of government operatives countless hours to make the film so utterly forgettable as to slip through the box office cracks unnoticed. But there was good reason for all the time spent doing so.

If we open ourselves up to the possibility that one villain is really just a souped-up Atari made to look like Russell Crowe doing a decent American accent, where do we stop questioning everything? Consider this: Have you ever been in a room with Saddam Hussein, the actual man? I didn't think so. That should make it abundantly doubtful a real Saddam Hussein even exists.

Everyone knows Iraq was only targeted by the military for one reason, and that's oil; this is only up for debate by people who enjoy deceiving themselves about everything, such as the government has only altruistic motives, or J.A.G. is a really good show. In fact, whenever you hear a government official say they want to bring democracy to another country, it should automatically translate as they have natural resources vital to our economy and are holding out. Hence we decided to bring democracy to Iraq, in exchange for barrel upon barrel of yummy oil.

Of course, Iraq was a foreign culture and has virtually no strategic value, following that we have no enemy after the Soviet Union dismantled and had no strategy against no enemy. The original leaders of Iraq, looking pretty dopey and smiling all the time like they just squeezed out a silent fart, weren't much motivation for the American people to go to war. So the U.S. war machine created the Saddam Hussein computer program, based an old Abbot & Costello routine beloved by Sec. Jim Bakker. "Who's in charge of Egypt?" "Hussein." "I'm sayin', I want to know." Love that one.

But if you build a computer program too good, as any hack movie producer knows, it can develop its own intelligence and decide to take things over. Which is exactly what happened when we installed the Saddam Hussein program on Iraqi Amigas. Pretty soon we did have a Saddam Hussein threat to overthrow—our own. He even generated independently more pictures of George Bush's Uncle Herb in full Iraqi military guard and had him doing ridiculous Herb-like things, such as waving a shotgun around or reading threatening messages to the U.S. government in great big glasses from his underground bunker.

Keep in mind, I still think the Saddam Hussein program is a threat, and if one mainframe carrying the program survived the Baghdad bombing, the danger remains. But all of this could have been dealt with much quicker and efficiently by planting a virus in the Iraqi intranet, or installing Windows 2000 on one of the network computers.

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Who's to blame, good people? That's what I've been asking myself all week: Who's to blame? That and, on an unrelated note, "Why did they cancel Gunsmoke when it was just getting good?"

The earlier question has been inspired by an incident that happened last Sunday, friends. I was enjoying an issue of Hot Dog magazine, as I'm prone to do on occasion, when my charming neighbor Mrs. Hardlevilch stopped by for a visit. As you may or may not know, people who are very close to dying in their old age make a "visit" a huge event, and Mrs. Hardlevilch is no exception. She was dressed in her finest pantsuit and babushka.

The three of us--myself, Mrs. Hardlevilch and my long-suffering wife, Arvelyn--all sat around talking over the state of things, or more commonly the state of things in 1949, the last year before everything went to pot in America. Mrs. Hardlevilch became very flustered and excited when I did my famous Louis Armstrong-in-a-blender impression, and that's when it happened.

Mrs. Hardlevilch wet my sofa! And floor, thanks to some unsightly dribbling, but mostly my sofa is what I'm concerned about.

Needless to say, I was perturbed. At first Mrs. Hardlevilch apologized rapidly, still laughing uncontrollably at my dead-on impression, and offered to build a time machine to go back fifteen minutes and put some plastic on the sofa before she sat down. I was intrigued, but it quickly became apparent her theories of time travel and plans to carry it out were extremely flawed. Within another minute, Mrs. Hardlevilch was convinced someone had entered the room and pissed on her, completely forgetting her role in staining my couch.

I'm now at my wit's end, and it wasn't far to go, let me tell you. I'm left asking, as I said before, who's to blame? Sure, I could sue Mrs. Hardlevilch in a court of law, but no jury is going to convict a withered old fossil of public urination since I'm not sure it's a crime and, truthfully, my living room isn't considered public domain. If I had deemed to shoot her, sure, it would have been legal, but her pissing all over my couch left me without much recourse of action once the moment for retaliation passed. Not that I would ever shoot the dear old women, she'd probably think it was the Kaiser shelling her homeland or something anyway.

If Mrs. Hardlevilch is not to blame, who is? Through some late-night detective work, I managed to find out Mrs. Hardlevilch wears Dapper Debutante brand adult "pads," so that offered me some hope. But so far all threatening letters have not received any offer to settle out of court, and I'm sure signing them with my real name wouldn't help. This means, of course, that there is a faulty product out there in Dapper Debutante adult "safety nets" and behind them is a company unwilling to admit they're responsible for the puddles of the greatest generation.

In the end, as Arvelyn pointed out, I probably have no one to blame but myself. There is nothing funnier in the world than my Louis Armstong-in-a-blender impression; I knew this and carried forth with thoughtless drive to entertain, floors and sofas be damned. More than a reasonable number of healthy young Americans have relieved themselves all over my property in response to my humoriffic comedy "closer." This might seem enough reason for anyone to stop, but I know I won't. The world needs hilarious impressions of famous loveable singers suffering severe torture in a comical fashion, and I think a sofa, after all is said and done, is a small price to pay.

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