Maybe a (really) old joke will help us see, with "movement" conservatives, how those icky things we call disasters are really opportunities

I feel bad for poor Pete Stark, getting into such a heap of trouble for suggesting that Chimpy the Prez is sowing death and destruction "for his amusement." Oh, for shame, Congressman Pete! How dare you say such a thing?

Of course we're not supposed to say things like that. "For his amusement"? Shocking! No, no, our Chimpy has some deeply held convictions about world policy and interglobular terroration, and while we may disagree with his viewpoint, or his tactics, we must never question his motivation. "For his amusement" indeed!

Forget the apologies--whatever happened to good old-fashioned solution of having him wash his mouth out with soap?

Well, Chimpy's "amusement" seems to me a loftier explanation (and one that would at least correlate with, if not exactly explain, all the bone-chilling smirking and stomach-turning chortling he does when he shows his putrid puss in quasi-public) than the more obvious one: that he is the shame-consumed possessor of the World's Tiniest Penis, which is apparently shrinking more every day, even as we speak, to what must by now be submicroscopic invisibility, forcing our Chimpy to take the most desperate steps imaginable in the hope of one day, someday, being able to feel, even for the fleetingest of microseconds, like a real man.

But I didn't come here today to talk about that. My brain is still stuck in the groove that produced my fulminations yesterday about the role the Bush regime seems to have played in making this year's Callifornia fire season . . . well, we can't say "the most"amusing" in recent memory. How about the gaudiest? Whee! Burn, baby, burn!

Yes, I'm still stuck thinking about the "thinking" that goes into the determination of "movement" conservatives to sit by and watch disasters befall their fellow humans. And as I've thunk, I kept hearing a little voice say:

"But they don't think of them as disasters at all. Not Iraq, not Katrina, not Southern California engulfed in flames and smoke. It's more like, you know, stuff just happening."

And I kept thinking of an old joke. A really old joke. So old that I can't remember exactly how I first heard it, back in the day. So I retreated to the Joke Lab to reconstruct it.

Now, it's a little embarrassing to find oneself reconstructing a joke, especially one this old anc creaky. Which may explain how I came to produce this undeniably overstuffed version. The joke probably works better in bam-bam-bam quickfire for. And maybe if I could have remembered the quickfire version straight off, I could have let it go at that, and we would all be spared a round of pain and humiliattion.

Anyway, here it is, the reconstructed version. (Raise your hand if you've never heard any version of it:)

Three geezers are playing cards in their Miami Beach condo complex, reminiscing about their lives before retirement.

Gus says, "I owned a dress company. Did a million dollars in sales our best year, before business started to slip. Then we had a terrible fire, whole place went up in flames. Probably some disgruntled former employee. Luckily the insurance paid $250K, and I retired here."

Max says, "I was one of the biggest furriers in the city, put minks and sables on the backs of celebrities, their names would make your eyes pop out. Then all those anti-fur crazies started getting attention, really started eating into my business. Just then some nut plants a bomb in my showroom, probably a terrorist--the FBI never caught the son of a bitch--and we're wiped out. There was a half mil in insurance, but I just didn't have he heart to start over."

Sid says, "I made children's toys. Business was so good, I built a new headquarters out in the suburbs, offices and factory all under one roof. Sure, I took my son-in-law in the business, an idiot as well as a crook, but he's family, so whaddaya gonna do? Every time I thought of having him whacked, my daughter would cry, 'Daddy, he's the father of your grandchildren.' Whaddaya gonna do?Luckily business was so good--knock wood--that I was able to carry the little pisher. Then out of nowhere comes a tornado, demolishes the whole operation, and wouldn't you know it, my shithead of a son-in-law wasn't even on the premises at the time! It was a total loss except for the five mil insurance payoff. But what's money when you see everything you've built up destroyed in an hour?"

Without missing a beat--so quickly, in fact, that they actually speak at the same time--Gus and Max ask, "How do you start a tornado?"

See, the thing is, "disaster" is such a loaded term. So judgmental. Wars? Killer hurricanes? Uncontrollable wildfires? Well, bad things happen sometimes, sure, but true modern conservatives know that every cloud has a silver lining, that when one door closes, another opens. As they say George W. Bush might say, if he hasn't already, "When God gives you, uh, lemons, you . . . no, maybe oranges, you make , , , you make a 500-percent profit."

You know how they always throw numbers around, about how this or that natural disaster has done so many millions of dollars of damage? Or even a billion they're talking about in California. Well, it's gonna cost even more than that to fix the damage--or maybe not fix it, but that money's sure as shootin' gonna be spent, and that's not a disaster, it's a doggone opportunity!

Or when those terrorist-loving Democrats whine sometimes about how many trilllions of dollars we're spending in Iraq? Completely forgetting that if we're spending it, it's going into somebody's pocket, which means we're growing the economy.

And don't you think that would amuse, you know, a "CEO president"?