Faced with tough questions about the economy and pre-war intelligence failures this week, President Bush interrupted a press conference Thursday with an unusual display of astronomical panic.

“Look! Up in the sky!” shouted Bush, pointing upward in mock terror. “We’re all going to die!”

According to White House press secretary Scott McClellan, the airborne terror President Bush cringed beneath before darting out of the room was the “Evil Eye” galaxy, a distant cluster of stars recently photographed by the Hubble space telescope, which according to Bush staffers will soon spell our mortal demise.

“The President cannot stress enough the importance of putting aside divisive squabbling involving lost jobs or unnecessary invasions,” explained McClellan. “Our very lives may be in his hands this day, and it’s time for the American people to band together with the president, now and through this coming November to repel this terrible threat to the American way of life.”

All available scientists and high-school educated adults have dismissed the president’s claims that the Messier 64 galaxy, known as the “Evil Eye” for an unusual appearance caused by stars and interstellar gas rotating in opposite directions, will within the next ten months attempt to suck the United States of America off the globe like a small child sucking the sticker off an orange. While no scientific evidence exists to suggest this is even the remotest of possibilities, President Bush remains steadfast in his message.

“Holy shit, run for your lives!” Bush screamed before ducking out of the room during a press conference on Saturday, shortly after being asked to reconcile conflicting statements he’d made about rolling back last year’s tax cuts.

Political pundits have observed that Bush’s obsession with the M64 galaxy began shortly after the results of a recent AP poll were released, showing the president had taken a sharp nosedive in public opinion after a month of Democratic presidential candidates pointing out his ample flaws. For the first time during Bush’s term, polls showed more Americans likely to vote against the president than for him, and similar polls showed Bush losing to Democratic presidential hopeful and dead man walking John Kerry in head-to-head voting. Bush staffers refute these claims, however, pointing out that Poles are unreliable and often the butt of stereotypical humor.

Other results of the AP polls show Bush’s numbers across the board as down sharply from one month ago, signaling that the president’s attempts to distract voters with fantastical tales of moon bases and Mars adventures were largely unsuccessful and kind of silly.

“Obviously putting a man on Mars didn’t turn people’s cranks as much as the president had hoped,” commented political strategist Vaughn Casey. “So Bush has wisely returned to his ‘Greatest Hits’ playbook in an effort to parlay national paranoia into a second term. It’s a longshot, sure, but if the president could convince average Americans that Al Qaeda actually posed a serious threat in their everyday lives, then I suppose some kind of sucking space monster isn’t really a giant leap of faith from there.”

Further requests to question the president as to the scientific basis of his fears were turned down on the grounds that Messier 64 might be listening.