King Chimp

Since we last checked in on then--presidential candidates Bore and Gush, an election of sorts occurred. The votes came in. They were counted. Mostly. More Americans voted for candidate Bore than candidate Gush, so Gush will be our king. But now, cut loose from his scowling android twin, our leader merits a name of his own, a title befitting a monarch who so ably combined his own august lineage with scads and scads of cash (like he says, “There‘s no greater American value than owning something”), a winning smile, subsimian intellectual powers and a seemingly bottomless capacity for hypocrisy, to climb through the thickets of what we persist in labeling the democratic process and gain the throne of the mightiest imperial power on the planet. I hope you will join me this 20th of January, on the occasion of the first coronation of the third millennium, by saluting your televisions, raising your voices, and crying loud and deep: All Hail King Chimp!

Apologies to that otherwise exemplary species. All fall, especially after the debates, pundits heaped accolades on the chimp who would be king for not embarrassing himself as wildly as everyone expected he might. What a wealth of gems they overlooked! From those debates and other forums, we can all giggle together, bitterly perhaps, at some of our new leader’s deepest thoughts on issues relevant to the public interest.

Let‘s begin with a topic on everyone’s minds, the appointments to the royal court. Asked if there were any questions he wishes he had asked Linda Chavez before her nomination, King Chimp responded: “I would have to ask the questioner. I haven‘t had a chance to ask the questioners the question they’ve been questioning. On the other hand, I firmly believe she‘ll be a fine secretary of labor.” Displaying his usual difficulties with that trickiest of English verbs, he said of Chavez, “She is a member of a labor union at one point.” And with typical creative elan, His Highness announced his choice for HUD chief: “I also have picked a secretary for Housing and Human Development, Mel Martinez from the state of Florida.” What does that “U” stand for, anyway?

Moving on to his specific policy prescriptions, King Chimp has learned quite a bit about an area regarding which he was once chided for his ignorance: foreign policy. In the second debate, he said of Nigeria, “It’s a fledgling democracy; we gotta work with Nigeria. It‘s an important continent.” Moving closer to home, he announced, “One of the cornerstones of our foreign policy must be trade. Not only trade in our own hemisphere, which I think is incredibly important for the United States, but also for Mexico and countries to the south.” The concept of the hemisphere is apparently a troubling one for him, for he also pronounced, “Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature, because it is a product that we can find in our own neighborhoods.” But he does like the word, using it again in this intriguing statement: “I supported the administration in Colombia. I think it’s important for us to be training Colombians in that part of the world. The hemisphere is in our interest to have -- to have a -- a peaceful Colombia”; and again: “We also need to have a hemispheric energy policy where Canada and Mexico and the United States come together. I brought this up recently with Vicente Fox, who‘s the newly elected president. He’s a man I know from Mexico.”

Foreign policy for King Chimp, like the oil business, is a simple matter of men he knows from Mexico, or elsewhere, of friends around the world joining together to lend a helping hand. “We‘re going to have to work with our friends and allies overseas,” he said, “particularly with the price of crude oil and heating oil, to make sure they understand that they’ve got to treat their friend, the United States, and our market with ease. They can‘t be punishing our friend.” But it’s not all so rosy: “There are people in this country -- in this world, who resent our country . . . There are people who don‘t like some of our allies, people who we’ll never abandon if I‘m the president.” Lest our allies worry too much about his plans to stick by their enemies, King Chimp clarified: “We’ll let our friends be the peacekeepers. The great country called America will be the pacemakers.” Finally, on the complex issue of nation building, he had this to say: “I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I‘m missing something here.”

Maybe. His thoughts on the economy are equally intriguing. “More and more of our imports come from overseas,” he worried. A problem indeed, but fortunately, “A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.” (The search is still on for an antidote to King Chimp.) About Bore’s tax plan, with its sinister, secret Irish nationalist agenda, the Chimp said, “It‘s so prescriptive, it’s going to require numerous IRA agents to even try to figure out what he means.”