What a difference a day makes
N ELITE PANEL of scientists, convened by The National Institutes of Health to study the effect of bushisms on the American brain, has determined that the added day provided by the 2008 leap year "poses a genuine threat of mental toxicity due to the additional exposure of 24 hours." The panel goes on to cite "the cumulative effects of multiple years of bushisms," and likens the continued exposure to that of cigarette smoking, noting, in a dire passage, that "the human organism can only take so much exposure to toxins of any kind before it simply breaks down."
Lead scientist Dr. Gary Scheffling noted in his press briefing that the level of toxicity "depends entirely on how busy the President is during his extra 24 hours." Dr. Scheffling went on to say, "If the president is not meeting with world leaders during the additional time, or giving a press conference, we might get by with just the current level of cognitive damage already suffered over these seven years, eight days, fourteen hours, twenty-seven minutes, and counting. There, we've just turned over another minute. Does anyone have an aspirin on them?"
Thus the chief recommendation of the NIH panel is that White House staff "do their utmost to give Mr. Bush a full 24 hours of down time in 2008," so as to neutralize what the panel calls "the crippling leap-year effect of poor sentence structure on the language centers of the brain." The day-long hiatus would reduce the potential likelihood of a national disaster that could, the panel's report states, "make Katrina look like a leaky faucet."
Sensing the darkened mood at his press briefing, Dr Scheffling added, "On a brighter note, our panel does not wish only to toll the bell of doom here. We'd also like to point out that there are so many more Americans in therapy now as compared to the pre-Bush years. The President may have secured his legacy after all, by single handedly erasing the stigma of mental illness one mangled sentence at at time."
© 2008 Kate Heidel
