nswering lawsuits filed by the ACLU and American Arab groups, the Justice Department touted the U.S.A. Patriot Act as the most effective tool against non-whites the government has ever had, at least since the outlaw of Jim Crow laws. The Patriot Act, named so in a misguided attempt to gain public sympathy through outlandish propaganda terms, was passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and allows the government easier access to wiretaps, monitors of suspicious individuals, and anything they damn well think is important.

Groups challenging the Patriot Act claim it gives the government too much unquestioned access to the privacy of Americans without the need to substantiate charges. Defenders of the group were too busy accessing the purchase records, credit reports, and group affiliations of the challengers to bother responding.

"Helping the government fight terrorism is one thing, the tactics endorsed by the Patriot Act are entirely another," said ACLU attorney Kim Wilde. "Let's suppose I'm a terrorist, living on American soil and taking flight lessons vital to my group's jihad. I buy one paperback of The Catcher in the Rye and all of a sudden the FBI is jumping all up my ass thinking I'm going to try to kill a Beatle or something. It's entirely without reason."

Arabic groups likewise expressed dismay.

"It's outrageous, even more than outrageous," insisted Arabic Anti-Defamation League spokesperson Bindari Al-Abib. "The Asians have had All-American Girl and The Joy Luck Club. The Indians have Bend it Like Beckham now. When will Arabs at last get their own sitcom? Just hear me out now. My idea is a single dad, a radiologist, named Amir. He works in a hospital, but a really funny hospital, and has an Arabic love interest who is also a radiologist. He's also a single dad, with two wise-cracking kids."

Opponents of the sitcom say the workplace and family comedy is long dead, and a hospital is a depressing place for people to work. While defenders of the Patriot Act express the necessity for the government to be given leeway in times of difficulty.

"Let's get something straight," said Justice Department spokesperson James Gattlebritch, "the government is wise and trustworthy enough to be trusted with access to anything they want. What do you think, the U.S. government is going to waste time checking out Amazon.com records to see you bought Kangaroo Jack? As if! Get over yourself, folks. We're only looking for the people who are terrorist, and have known affiliation with terrorist groups. Or look shady. Just, you know, shady. You know the kind of people."

The ambiguity of language leads many skeptics to believe the Justice Department is engaging in illegal racial profiling. An allegation some are comfortable with.

One proponent of racial profiling is author and conservative advocate Rash Tinker. "Facts are facts. It makes no sense to pull white people out of line at the airline checkpoints and search them for terrorist weapons. It's just common sense. When have white people ever been terrorists? Outside of the IRA and a few European nationalist groups, never. We know the Arabs are responsible for the biggest terrorist act since the Oklahoma City bombing. I don't see the problem with just searching Arabs."

.S. soldiers sifted through the rubble of a doghouse on the outskirts of Mosul Saturday, celebrating the successful completion of a daring raid that ended with the death of Saddam Hussein’s infamous poodle, Ralphie. Early reports indicate the soldiers were tipped off by an opportunistic local merchant intent on collecting the $5 million reward offered by the U.S. government for information leading to the death or capture of the former dictator’s prime pooch.

“Now more than ever all Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and will not be coming back,� President Bush said, modifying slightly a sales pitch from a commercial for Dodge trucks he’d heard that morning.

“A dog that had helped oppress the Iraqi people for years has been put down, and put down with extreme prejudice,� Bush continued, possibly referencing Apocalypse Now by way of Old Yeller.

A public outcry followed when Bush made similar statements after the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s sons Odai and Qusai last week, proclaiming the regime to be history despite the fact that Saddam himself was still at large and U.S. forces were coming under attack on a daily basis. But Bush assured reporters that with the death of Hussein’s poodle, the regime really was totally gone now. Even more so than before. Bush added that Saddam himself was powerless without his bumbling pervert sons or canine best friend. Unless, of course, Saddam is captured or killed, in which case he would be revealed as an all-powerful monster capable of shooting laser beams out of his eyes.

This latest raid was an even more impressive show of force than the last, when U.S. soldiers cornered Hussein’s sons in the bedroom of a house and dispatched everything short of a tactical nuclear strike to “apprehend� the two men and a teenage boy, who were reportedly armed with two handguns, several rocks and a bad attitude. The doghouse in question, one of several “safe houses� Ralphie was known to have in the area, was hit with several Tomahawk cruise missiles and “blown completely to shit� according to military personnel. Army officials said it was too early to comment on whether or not photos of the dead poodle would be distributed to the Iraqi public as proof of his demise, since this would depend on how much of Ralphie they could successfully scrape off of a nearby tree.

Despite the optimism of the Bush administration, however, Saddam Hussein remains at large. Local rumors have Saddam disguised as everything from a very ugly woman to a butcher, baker or candlestick maker. One highly slurred report insisted the former dictator was inexplicably disguised as American diva Aretha Franklin, which would be hilarious. But for the commune’s money, this reporter says Hussein is probably roaming the countryside dressed as Osama Bin Laden, all the better to elude U.S. forces.

The local merchant who offered the tip, Kamal al-Majid, gave one quote before he was taken into protective custody and most likely transferred to the Witness Relocation Program in America.

“It was my decision that the people of Mosul had harbored this dog long enough. He stood in the way of the creation of a new Iraq at the hands of our generous pig-dog American infidel friends. Also, he shit on my sidewalk this morning and that I cannot abide! So now he must go to his great reward in the land where all bitches are in heat.�

In the interest of hilarious irony, it is this reporter’s hope that al-Majid’s new life in America somehow involves running a pet store or being involved in veterinary care in the field of loose bowels, if such a thing exists.

In related news Sunday, marines castrated a Shetland pony thought to be loyal to the regime.

Welcome to part one of a very special commune promotional feature (what the powers that be at the commune don't know won't hurt them), a series of excerpts from my upcoming book "You Look Like An Asshole: The History of Fads." Unless the world ends in the next month, parts one and two will look at the greatest fad decade ever known to man: the 1950's.

The 1950's were a fertile decade for embarrassing fads, as the national IQ had reached a record low not seen since the days when our ancestors thought it would be fun to take the Indians out and get them drunk. America in the 1950's was still reeling from the fact that the country's best minds had burnt themselves out cracking Nazi code in WWII, so by the 50's they just spent their time inventing crap like the hula-hoop and the scooter. This is the only acceptable explanation for a generation of otherwise passable Homo sapiens running around with tap shoes on their feet all the time. Nobody is certain how that insanity got started, but it wasn't long before you weren't anybody if you didn't sound like a team of Clydesdales walking down the street. Eventually this trend had to be outlawed after basketball spectators started going deaf and there was one too many tragic fires started by workers in the nation's flint quarries.

When looking at Fads of the 50's, few can top the practice of piling a bunch of assholes into a phone booth for the present-day denial factor of all involved. This originally started as a way for Universities to inexpensively house foreign exchange students, but before long the insecure white student populace decided that no foreign pinkos were going to show them how many peer-pressured nimrods you could squeeze into a phone booth. Like all fads, this soon grew out of hand and by 1958 it was impossible to find a phone booth anywhere that wasn't stuffed to the ceiling with dead college students.

Later, after the practice was outlawed, it was discovered that the record everyone was trying to beat (25 people stuffed into one telephone booth) was actually set by two guys who were so stoned that every time the phone rang they thought there was somebody else in the booth with them. Thankfully for the runaways and drug dealers with a legitimate need to use public telephones, this fad was soon replaced with one involving how many duck farts you could squeeze into a Volkswagen.

Another front-runner for stupidest fad ever was the Duck's Ass haircut. Invented by a barber in the 1940's as a joke on neighborhood kids he didn't like, the grease-mop style spread locally as all the other kids became insecure that their heads didn't look enough like the ass-end of a duck and demanded a quick remedy to their respectable appearance. This fluke probably would have ended with that gaggle of lead paint chip-eating imbeciles, but as fate would have it, dimwitted local rocker Roger Stagg of the Jersey Turnpikes inadvertently modeled the style while being beaten by the New York City police on the evening news one night in 1951, and within minutes of the broadcast the Duck's Ass had landed on heads all throughout the faux-tough world. Musicians and movie stars mistook the style for the look of the street, and after they adopted the haircut it trickled down and eventually became the actual look of the street, in some kind of bizarre chicken-eating-an-egg loop that it hurts the brain to comprehend.

However, this look soon faded away after a few dozen greasers bought the farm while blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, and tales of these grisly grease-fire head infernos spread to suburbia. That part was left out of The Outsiders; but trust me, it was like Vietnam crossed with a Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial.

The 1950's also saw the birth of the panty raid, a masculine rite of passage for guys who would never, ever get laid. This unfortunate craze started when some wiseacre convinced the incoming class of freshman males at Tulane University that if they snuck into the girls' dorms and stole all their underwear, the girls would have no choice but to walk around naked all year and have promiscuous sex with anyone who asked politely. This being the 1950's, the guys bought it hook, line and sinker, and a shallow gene pool tradition was born. At first girls retaliated by staging their own boxer raids, but that turned out to be a lot of work and soon the girls discovered that sleeping only with jerks was the best revenge of all.

There were more ridiculous fads in the 1950's alone than there are deadbeat dads on the commune payroll, but this column is already longer than Leo Tolstoy's wedding vows so you'll have to stuff that curiosity back into the cat until next issue. Until then and possibly after, I'm Griswald Dreck.

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