Crassnerd On Trade with N. Korea

Bush Reiterates Threat of No Ipods for Jong


Segways, plasma TVs for Jong's people also hang in the balance, says US President

President Bush announced on Thursday his intention to ask formerly maligned bad-guy Kim il Jong, the leader of North Korea, to send troops to support the US effort in
Iraq.

He'll Reconsider If Jong Sends Troops to Iraq, says Bush

Washington DC (December 11)
by Paul Crassnerd, AP

North Korean leaders will find no Apple Ipods, Segway scooters, or large-screen plasma TVs in their Christmas stockings come December 25, said President Bush again yesterday in Washington.

Bush said he was raising the issue again since he had not heard from the North Korean leader since issuing the same threat a few weeks ago, and the number of shopping days between now and Christmas is "always less now today than it was before earlier."

"It's gonna be rough Christmas in Pyongyang," said the President.

"However, that could change," said Bush, "if Jongie-boy will fork over some of his toy soldiers to help the cause of freedom in Iraq."

"See, it's a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-your-back kinda deal," said Bush.

Earlier in the month, Bush had said NATO countries "need to step up to the plate" by sending more troops to Iraq. Bush reportedly once desired to be US baseball commissioner, said a White House spokesman explaining the sports metaphor. However, Bush increasingly sees the "victory-challenged" US involvement in Iraq as a bit of history that could cloud his pursuit of that goal.

The only NATO nation responding directly and publicly to Bush's request was Britain, which did so by announcing that most British troops would be out of Iraq by the end of the coming year.

That led Bush to go a bit farther afield in search of new allies, said a White House source, who requested anonymity, which White House sources increasingly do.

"I'd hoped that if I showed smarts in the lesser job, of US top guy, they'd let me be Baseball Commissioner," said Bush. "Now, I don't know."

Pulled back on message by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, Bush said "What's important is freedom, see, and if Jong wants to party with an ipod at the office Christmas party, he's gonna have to dance with the one that brung him."

Asked by reporters to inform the President that Christmas is not widely celebrated in the largely non-religious nation, and that the US had not brought the North Koreans to any particular place other than a place of enhanced prestige among US opponents, Tony Snow briefly looked puzzled then said, "You tell him, and you might want to tell Karl, as well," apparently referring to White House strategist Karl Rove.

Rove did not immediately return reporters' calls, and one staffer said the strategist had been phoning in his advice for over a month, since attending an auction in Woody Creek, Colorado the previous month, in which several footlockers of unspecified personal items belonging to the late journalist Hunter S. Thompson were sold to the highest --- or rather highest-bidding -- bidder.

"He's been different since then," said the staffer, who refused to be identified, but who sounded much like Karl Rove on a combination of helium, bad biker speed, PCP, and Ecstacy, (or "X") and desalinated horse urine, according to a former colleague listening to this reporter's tape of the call. The former colleague said Rove is thought to have spent most of the Iraq war on that combination, which came to be known in the Executive Office Building as a "screwball".

"The horse urine is thought by Indonesians to give a man the sexual power of a young stallion, but tests show it only poisons the decision center in the cerebral cortex," said the former colleague. "So it leads to really bad decisions. The PCP and X make bad decisions seem okay, and the speed enables users to make decisions quicker. The net result is one can make bad decisions quicker, and everything seems okay." "It's nuts," he added.

It wasn't a really huge problem, said the former colleague, until Rove talked Bush into trying it, and the President's addictive personality took over. "That's when I quit, when they wanted us all to start drinking the Kool-Aid," he said. "It's quite a ritual now."

The former colleague said he didn't know where Thompson got the screwball idea, but that shortly before his death, the journalist had visited Tehran, and had come back really excited.

Thompson always had wanted to expand his Gonzo Journalism franchise, and the Iranians had made him believe he could set up something extraterrestrial, according to Rove's former colleague.

"But you know, that stuff he brought back in the footlockers, it was too much for even a strong mind like Hunter's," said the colleague, "and it certainly wasn't meant for lesser minds in lesser men, especially if they happened to be guiding US foreign policy," he added.

Asked point-blank if he had any hard evidence that President Bush or his advisors actually had ingested the "screwball" drug combination, Thompson's former colleague thought for a moment and then replied, "No."

But after a moment, he spoke again. "Unless you count Bush asking Iran and Syria to help him, um, 'stabilize' Iraq." Presumably, said the source, that would be so that Bush could then move on to regime change in those two countries, "...earlier named by Bush as ball bearing in the 'axis of evil'..."

"I mean....." said the former Rove colleague, but his voice trailed off.

Paul Crassnerd