espite tests to its resolve, the United States has remained firm in its Iraq occupation since March of 2003. For more than two years the U.S. has maintained the law in Iraq and the sweet, sweet oil under its ground, even as terrorists and insurgents and, basically, anybody with a firearm has attempted to disrupt the peace forced on the country. Now, with the civilian dead count nearing a total of 25,000, the U.S. can be proud of fulfilling its pledge to stick with Iraq no matter how many are killed.

President Bush restated the U.S. perseverance on Saturday, following a surge in the death toll, a response by anti-U.S. insurgents to last week's announcement of Iraq's new transitional government.

"They can bomb us, they can shoot us, they can set our corpses on fire," said the president, "and we will not be shaken from Iraq until we've established a lasting democracy. And when I say 'us,' I mean the soldiers and civilians over there."

More than 300 have been killed in the two-week span following the announcement of the transitional government, which is saddled with making the transition to a comparatively stable Middle Eastern democracy from a valley of death ruled by violent fanatics.

Insiders say the administration has made it a point of pride to survive for so long in a region where we're clearly not wanted, even as we lose hundreds of our own citizens and thousands of Iraqi residents. The president, we're told, is optimistic about everything settling down once we reach 25,000 non-military dead, but assures the rest of the world and the remaining Iraqi citizens the U.S. won't be bullied out even if 250,000 or 25 million are killed during the occupation.

"In a great cowboy movie, the Lone Ranger doesn't run out of town just because Butch Cavendish comes riding in with his gang," said the president. "That would make him yella in the eyes of the townspeople. There. I think I've adequately explained my foreign policy."

His cowboy metaphor sufficiently delivered, Bush returned to his domestic efforts of stripping away civil rights, privatizing all social programs, and delivering more ground to the extreme Christian right. The rising death count itself took a backseat to the negligible news of the arrest of a top aide to Al-Zarqawi, the most recent in a long line of Middle Eastern Hitlers, who has among his more devious crimes refused to spell his name with a "u" after "q."

While some claim Al-Zarqawi, once arrested, will only be replaced with another anti-American despot in a region increasingly anti-American in its sentiment, others tell them to shut up and stop spoiling our fun. With the maximum civilian death toll standing around 24,000 right now, including Iraqi police and non-military, as well as foreign and American contractors, the administration is still persistent that 25,000 dead will be the turning point everyone's waiting for. Scotlar Hughes, a political science professor at Bolchek University, Ames, Iowa, believed the president would be proven right in his plan to outlast the opposition in Iraq.

"Consider it a game of chicken," said Prof. Hughes, conducting a phone interview with this poor son of a bitch reporter, still stationed in Fallujah. "It's a contest of wills right now between the president and the nameless mass of anti-American insurgents still residing in and around Iraq. Only, the president has nothing to lose—he's not even putting his own neck on the line, but the neck of soldiers and civilians in the area. He's already won re-election and Americans have so tuned out of politics the notion of lawmakers winning opposition against him is remote. What is he really risking? Sure, he may go down in history books as the worst president during his own lifespan, but this president doesn't read anyway. And as for the fanatics… how many of them can there be in Iraq anyway?"

ride-to-be and self-kidnapping victim/perpetrator Jennifer Wilbanks
copped to several charges on Saturday, including illegal self-confinement
and terroristic threatening to your own persons. The missing Georgia
"runaway bride," as some less respectful newspapers have dubbed Wilbanks,
disappeared and reported herself kidnapped on the day of her wedding,
only to turn up later when she managed to escape from herself and phoned
her lucky husband-to-be, whose name we withheld out of respect to the
poor bastard.

Police found and arrested the abductor, Wilbanks herself, and held her in
custody as they built a case. Rather than face herself in court during a
lengthy trial, Wilbanks confessed to all the crimes she was accused of,
in hopes of getting the whole thing sorted out before her big wedding.
But Wilbanks didn't forgive herself so easily for her downfall.

"I also want to let myself know that I won't forget what I've done to
myself anytime soon," warned Wilbanks, in a statement released by her
lawyer, who may be Wilbanks herself in yet another impressive role. "Do
I hear that? I won't be getting away from me so easily. I'll let
me forget about me for a while, but one day, when I least expect it,
I'll turn around, and I'll be there. And I won't be happy."

Wilbanks refused to answer questions as to whether she was threatening
herself with bodily harm, and other reporters just laughed when this
correspondent tried to get them to back up his questioning.

With the abductee/abductor refusing to answer questions, the commune
sought out an expert on self-abduction, Audrey Seiler, a Wisconsin
college student who tried to kidnap herself in April of last year.
Seiler disappeared from her off-campus apartment March 27, 2004, and
was found four days later, telling police she was abducted by a man
with a knife. Seiler confessed to kidnapping herself only when police
discovered a videotape of the young woman buying a knife, duct tape,
rope, and cold medicine all in one purchase, though this reporter can't
picture a weekend coming and going without buying all of those items.

"I know in my case, it just came out of nowhere," said Seiler. "You're
walking along, you think everything's fine and dandy, then—bam!
You jump out of nowhere, put a hand over your mouth, and force yourself
into an alley. I had my car with me, which was lucky, so I forced myself
into the trunk, then had to get out and actually drive myself to the
hideout. But I kept a knife on myself, so I wouldn't try anything funny.
It's really scary. I've known myself for a long time, but I've never seen
myself like that before."

Seiler also admits she wasn't sure what made her kidnap herself; at first
she thought it was just a sorority prank or something, but then recalled
she hadn't pledged any sorority at all. At that point, she began to doubt
her mental stability.

"The police never understand," said Seiler. "They always think you can
wait for a moment when your back is turned and escape. But you're
paralyzed with fear, afraid of what you'll do to yourself. That's why I
didn't want to tell the police who had really done it."

As for the case of Wilbanks herself, the most recent victim/perpetrator
of self-kidnapping, Seiler had some thoughts on what might motivate her
to such a twisted crime.

"I really, really liked that Runaway Bride movie. She probably
did, too. She probably thought she'd kidnap herself, hoping a cool
Richard Gere-type, only not so gay, would come to her rescue. It never
works out, trust me. I was inspired by the movie Excess Baggage,
but it's never as fun as it looks. Spend a few days out in the woods by
yourself and it takes all the charm out of being held at knifepoint."

Don't even start with the nonsense about this all being Omar Bricks' fault. Because I won't stand, sit, or recline for it.

In case you've been living on Planet Asshole in the Out-of-Touch Nebula for the last month, you probably noticed that the commune's been running third-string filler for the last month. And maybe you're the curious kind of son of a bitch who wondered why. Good for you, kissass.

First, the facts: No one is sure how all those weasels got into the commune's offices, where they came from, or what they were eating in there for a month, besides Ivana Folger-Balzac's expired birth control pills and possibly Gay Bagel. But whatever the reason, the last month at the commune has been like some insane cross between War of the Worlds and Gremlins. I also want to throw Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke into the mix, for no other reason than that I really like that movie.

Having 1,200 weasels suddenly descend upon the office at 7:15 one morning did surprisingly little to interrupt business at usual at the commune for the first few days. We just had to turn up the talk radio a little louder to hear over the sounds of all those weasels fucking and killing each other. But then the rapidly-reproducing weasel population spread to our downstairs neighbors Crochet! magazine through the heating ducts and those candyasses had to learn how to use a flamethrower, which threatened to throw off the balance of the commune-Crochet! arms race, so Bagel decided to call in an exterminator, a safari guide and an exorcist to handle the problem.

This somehow gave the exterminator the wrong idea, since he joined forces with the weasels and killed both the safari guide and the exorcist before being double-crossed by those devious weasels, who were then all the more dangerous for being armed with chemicals and mousetraps.

Naturally, once the shit had completely hit the fan, they called on Omar Bricks to solve the problem. Or, more accurately, we all got locked out of the building after the weasels declared it an independent state and I had to call home for Foghat to come bail us all out, because I had left my car keys in my pants pocket up in my office and there was no fuckin' way I was walking all the way home.

Twenty minutes later Foghat showed up wearing his favorite trucker hat, went upstairs, and took a shit so nasty the weasels cleared out like an afterbar party when Truman Capote shows up, or at least the ones did that didn't turn to stone instantly upon contact with that toxic dog-funk.

But then it turned out we'd only traded one problem for another, since after Foghat dropped the ass fantastic nobody could figure out how to get that Chernobyl crap out of the office without sacrificing anyone smart enough to operate the elevator. Finally Bagel called the police, but the bomb squad refused to go in, so they had to send in their remote-controlled bomb robot, which kept rebooting every time it got within twelve feet of that epic turd.

Eventually they just decided to set the building on fire, or else that may have been the result of one of the flaming arrows I'd been shooting in the windows in hopes of taking out Ramrod Hurley or some other weasel, I'm not sure which it was. But the building definitely caught on fire and through some weird alchemy Foghat's ass-baby turned into a gnarly, turd-shaped cubic zirconium, which I'm now using as a paperweight on my desk.

commune fans or PETA freaks might remember a similar incident three years ago, when the commune offices were overrun by a staff of monkeys hired by Red Bagel to help the commune appeal to a more upscale readership. Similarities to that incident aside, this was definitely the worst time the commune has been overrun by small animals. Except of course for the great bass attack of 2003, but that goes without saying. Bricks out.

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