THE BEST PERSON MONEY COULD BUY S. Jayasankaran
DUBYA had won and he was, quite clearly, the best person money could buy.
John Kerry didn't like that one bit for he'd spent enough money to elicit an admiring whistle from the United Malays National Organisation and it still hadn't helped matters.
Worse still, he may have lost by a chin and he privately vowed revenge against Jay Leno for having the cheek to resemble him.
As George W. Bush strolled among the cattle in his Texas ranch with the pleasing, presidential strains of Hail to the Beef ringing in his ears, his heart almost burst with pride as he reflected upon his mighty accomplishments.
He'd restored chaos in Iraq, bombed Afghanistan back to the Bronze Age and removed the French from "fries".
He'd found it odd that the federal budget should come out even and had spent so mightily that the armaments industry had declared him a national treasure.
There were misgivings, of course, but they were piffling ones mostly raised by Paul Krugman who didn't count as he disliked hamburgers which proved that he was a closet communist in any case.
Sure, the US's biggest budget surplus in history now resembled a black hole of red ink but what was good for Haliburton was good for America, by God! Wasn't that in the Bible somewhere?
Dubya knew he hadn't been extravagant because that was a word -- probably not English -- to describe how other people -- atheists, no doubt -- spent their money.
"What's US$450 billion (RM1.71 trillion) between friends," asked the president who cared very deeply about his friends.
They did too and all agreed that it was right and proper that tax cuts should favour All Rich People but Paul Krugman whose name sounded too sinister to be American anyway.
Maybe he was French, brooded the president who worried mightily about that ungrateful nation.
There was something ungodly about a country that used so much butter for so few heart attacks.
And he had goals to accomplish in his next term: there was the French in "dressing" and what about that scandalous noun in "letter"? It all seemed vaguely decadent and downright un-American when you got to the heart of the matter.
"Sacre bleu" muttered the French, hastily burning all their Kerry-for-President stickers.
They wanted to ingratiate themselves with the new president and hoped he
wouldn't find out that they'd passed the rumour -- in French, of course -- that he'd had Alzheimer's disease.
Actually, that wasn't true because Alzheimer himself testified that, as far as he knew, it was his disease.
All the French wanted were American assurances that they could use as much butter in their cuisine as they liked and test as many nukes in the South Pacific as the Kyodo Protocol disallowed.
Both requests seemed eminently reasonable to Dubya although he was a bit sceptical about the butter bit. He was well read and as mindful of the dangers of cholesterol as the next man.
What the president-elect didn't like were namby-pamby mutterings about human rights in Iraq and the reason behind the invasion in the first place.
That's why he liked places like Malaysia which had some serious cutting edge technology.
Things like the Internal Security Act, thought the president with a shock of clarity, could rid the globe of namby-pamby'ism altogether and he wondered if he should inform the World Health Organisation.
But what Dubya hated most of all were scurrilous statements that he'd invaded Iraq for its oil. That was galling and he longed to clap his accusers in Kamunting*, Alabama.
The world had gone to pot in his opinion. Actually, it had gone from being flat to round to crooked.
McArthur, decided Dubya, had said it best: "War is Shell."
-------------- *Kamunting is the site of a detention camp, where people are held without trial for up to two-year terms, renewable indefinitely. In the past, most detainees were said to be communists; now, they are said to be Islamic extremists. The enabling act for such detentions is the Internal Security Act.