no joke
'Vegetable in Chief: Bush's brain activity is fading fast'
Date: Friday, April 01 @ 09:43:22 EST
By D.P. Sorensen, Salt Lake Weekly
Top neurological experts have concluded that President George W. Bush shows all the signs of being in a persistent vegetative state. "There is a total absence of cognitive function and verbalization," said Dr. Lester Frennell, head neurologist at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. "His public utterances are gibberish. The man is incapable of uttering a grammatical sentence, let alone a meaningful one. People who purport to find sense in his speeches are like pet owners who think their dogs can talk."
Dr. Frennell added that Mr. Bush's famous winks, smirks and nasal chortles are merely neurological quirks, involuntary twitches of the autonomic nervous system. "The cerebral cortex is long gone. All that's left is the brain stem, sending out random electrical impulses. When you see him following a balloon across the room with his beady eyes, it's the same involuntary movements that occur when he's reading a teleprompter."
Bush supporters, led by the Christian right and the Fox News Channel, are disputing the diagnosis of PVS, claiming that the president has "cycles of wakefulness" and is "alert, conscious, and responsive." At a hastily called news conference, Bush's hulking brother Jeb said he had an affidavit from an "acknowledged expert" that proved the president, rather than being in a persistent vegetative state, was actually in a "state of minimal consciousness."
According to the affidavit signed by Manolo Casablanca, a White House manservant on at least one occasion the president displayed signs of life. "When I bring a platter of pretzels into Mr. George's TV room during the NCAA game between Utah and UTEP, he perked up just a bit." Normally, the president watches TV with glazed eyes and a gaping mouth and shows no awareness of anyone else in the room. (Aides say that there's an executive order banning Bush's mother, the formidable Barbara, from entering the White House. She's the only living mortal being capable of rousing George from his TV trances, shouting out things like, "Get off your pratt, you worthless pinhead!") On the occasion Manolo brought Bush some pretzels, the recumbent president starting snapping his fingers during a Coke commercial.
In making the argument that his brother is not in a persistent vegetative state, Jeb Bush pointed out that other hypotheses have been put forward to explain his brother's cretinoid behavior.
"For instance, a number of eminent scientists are of the opinion that the president's brain was put in backward when assembly line angels were installing standard mental equipment. This explains why he is always mixing up words and saying things like, 'America is a place where wings take dream,' and 'Personal investment accounts do not permanently fix the solution.' With his brain installed backwards, my brother is famously confused about subjects and verbs, regularly saying things like, 'the illiteracy level of our children are appalling.' But George at times also suffers from another kind of confusion. Just recently he was introducing the wife of a fellow politician, and said, 'Karen is with us. She's a West Texas girl, just like me.'"
Jeb Bush made reference to several other hypotheses about his brother's cognitive deficiencies. Early in his career, observers attributed his appalling stupidity to being dropped on his head while he was a cheerleader at Yale University. But longtime friends say George was dumb as a post well before attending Yale.
There are many adherents of the theory that several years of hard drinking destroyed Mr. Bush's brain cells. Many patients resume normal mental functioning after going on the wagon; the president, however, seems to have had a low brain cell count to begin with, and lacked sufficient gray matter to bounce back into even subnormal functioning.
The Bush camp is fighting desperately to have the president's feeding tube reinserted. "We're counting on the Supreme Court to rule in our favor," said spokesman Scott McClellan. "They appointed him president in the first place, and now they can return him to his persistent vegetative state. Let me also point out that if Bush expires, Vice President Cheney will become president, and do we really want to have a man in the White House who needs a daily heart massage to stay alive?"
Meanwhile, the administration is stage-managing carefully scripted appearances by the vegetative president. Taking a page from the playbook of former President Kennedy, who told a throng of screaming Germans "Ich bin ein Berliner," Bush handlers had the president appear before a contingent of perplexed Iraqi dignitaries and announce, "I am a vegetarian." |
