At Bush Central, the comedy never stops. Coming up next: Tiny George decides to discipline a regime slug for breaking the law. (Just kidding! Ha ha!)

I can see why Howie's all worked up over poor Lurita Alexis Doan, whom he characterizes as "yet another postergirl for Republican corruption." Well, of course, she is that! But the question I think it's important to ask, as the Bush regime continues its transmogrification into a 24/7 comedy outlet, is: But is the bit funny?

At first glance you'd think material like this is made to order for, say, The Daily Show. Then it occurs to you that maybe it's like trying to do a parody of a soap opera. How do you parodize something that is inherently parody?

Still, if I were Jon Stewart, I wouldn't take this sitting down. The damned Bush regime is trying to put him out of business by converting the government into a sequence of comedy bits.

Personally, I thought I'd bust a gut when I read the opening graf of Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s account in this morning's Washington Post ("Bush Is Asked to Discipline GSA Chief in Hatch Act Inquiry"):

The U.S. special counsel has called on President Bush to discipline General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan "to the fullest extent" for violating the federal Hatch Act when she allegedly asked political appointees how they could "help our candidates" during a January meeting.

Man, I was laughing so hard, I was almost in tears. It's hard to say what's most preposterous about this, but surely the most hilarious joke is Tiny George, the Tiniest George of them all, disciplining anybody.

Oh, I don't doubt that as a budding sociopath the Tiny One tortured way more than his share of small and especially helpless creatures. But when it comes to creatures of the human sort, can anyone imagine that he is anything but the torturee--i.e., the M rather than the S in S/M? It seems to me just a matter of time before some investigation or another turns up the confidential files of one of the personal dominatrix services His Tininess has patronized. I expect we'll find that the role-players he requested most often were:

* the Monster from Outer Space Momma who harangues, belittles, ridicules, and humiliates her oldest child--and also expects him to ease the life pain of being serially humiliated by a philandering, emotionally vacant husband whose DNA tests show that there is actually nothing there.

* the "Mousy Liberrian" who finally gets fed up with her bad, bad boy and warns him that if he doesn't shape up, she's going to have to squoosh his teeny-tiny balls and have them made into refrigerator magnets.

(What I'll be personally most curious to learn is whether the Tiny One had a gender preference for the service professionals who were cast in these roles. There's plenty of precedent here. In their screechingly funny Seven Deadly Sins, didn't Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht cast the Mother as the bass of the all-male quartet that makes up their heroine Anna's family? At the time Barbara Pierce, not yet Bush, was still a wee child.)

I suppose the more serious absurdity, though, is the idea of anyone in the Bush regime punishing anyone else in the regime for breaking the law--in particular some cockamamie law against politicizing government activity. The fundamental principle of this regime is that you get punished for failing to make every action by everyone under the power of the regime an attempt to perpetuate the power of the regime or use those powers for the benefit of friends, cronies, and ideological cohorts of the regime.

Do I hear . . . Medal of Freedom?


CONFIDENTIAL TO LURITA

Just in case, you might want to get the names of some good Washington lawyers--a good one, mind you, not one of those high-priced clowns like Irving "Lewis" Libby saddled himself with. You especially want to steer clear of all those Regents U. "law grads" stumbling around D.C. Unless you're planning to just plead guilty.

You might also want to see if you can get some kind of legal defense fund going. You probably think of yourself as the ultimate team player, but again unless you're cool with the idea of just taking one for the team, you may be spooked to find out just how alone it's possible to feel. (If only you'd had the foresight to get yourself elected to something, rather than just accept appointment to a job for which you were so manifestly and uniquely unqualified. At least then you could be converting your reelection war chest into a defense fund.)


ONE NIT TO PICK: TOO MANY SCOTTS

Confidential to the White House head comedy writer: One thing you may want to watch in your sketches is the pile-up of characters named "Scott." In this story, for example, the special counsel who did the GSA report and wrote the letter to the president is named Scott J. Bloch; the White House political aide who conducted the famous staff briefing exhorting the boys and girls of GSA to do it for the GOP is named J. Scott Jennings; and the White House spokesman who issued the ritual "fuck-off" statement ("It's an internal deliberation, and we don't talk about internal deliberations at the White House") is named Scott Stanzel.

In making up and naming your imaginary characters, there are books of names you could consult. For example, there are many books of the "what shall we name the baby?" genre, filled with men's and women's names. Meanwhile, here are some names other than Scott--all proven comedy gold--you could consider:

Burt (or Bert)
Stan
Lou (or Lew)
Ezekiel
Alberto
John
Henry
Nehemiah