resident George "Whitewash" Bush tried to put to rest the media uproar over his service record in the national guard with a brief prepared statement Friday. Bush revealed his mixed feelings for the Vietnam war, saying once and for all his personal feelings about the conflict stemmed from the apparent lack of oil or natural resources for plundering in the country.

"Before I have alluded to personal reservations about the Vietnam war," the statement began. "These were private concerns, but since the media is preoccupied with the past, let me at last tell everyone I believe the war in Vietnam was misguided. I believe any military action that puts men in danger, when there is no profit to be made in oil or rich natural resources, or a lone figurehead to be vengefully removed from power, is wrong."

It was a dangerous statement for a war-hungry president during an election year, an area that could be mined by election-greedy Democrats and any forgettable third party candidates who might appear on public television or radio to complain. Even conservatives who traditionally back the president expressed initial worry about the president's dedication to the war on terror, or plans for a second term war on Iran, Syria, and Rendibaba, a little shit of an island unknown to everybody but rich in coal.

"Make no mistake," press secretary Scott McClellan responded, fielding questions from frothing reporters, "the president has no doubts about military action in Iraq or any country that supports terrorism. The president stands firm on wars for vengeance and resource exploitation. In Iraq we had both."

And the war on terror?

"That falls under the column of vengeance," assured McClellan, drawing a line with his hand. "Column A, vengeance. That's like Iraq, or Panama or something. Florida. Column B, we're talking exploitation of natural resources. President's all for that. I mean, really for that. Sometimes we have to talk him out of invading ally countries like Mexico. Loads of fat, juicy resources down there. Make his mouth water."

The president's statement could be seen as a desperate act by an administration beleaguered with a bad news week, including continued focus on intelligence mistakes and a plea from WMD inspector David Kay for the president to admit there are no weapons in Iraq. A greater problem during the week was the unearthing of questions about Bush's service in the National Guard during the year from 1972 to 1973, and records could only prove he served nine days in uniform that year, unless you count the Good Humor Man outfit he wore during a summer job.

For supporters of the president, the hope is the statement, no matter how unexpected, will allow the discussion to slip out of public light and turn national attention toward things the president likes, such as apathy, or J. Lo-Affleck gossip-dishing. For Democrats, many are optimistic that the statement will further entrench the president in an uphill battle to explain his role in the Iraq war.

"Ya-wa-hoo!" screeched Democrat presidential nominee front-runner John Kerry, who then proceeded to do a sort of jig most resembling a Riverdance theme. Further questions were not answered as Kerry hopped, twisted, and scuttled into the streets outside, in the direction of the setting sun, presumably hoping others would join him as in a Dr. Pepper commercial.

ontinuing efforts to keep the peace in we-torn Iraq turned for the worse with the White House revelation Sunday that the "top card in the deck," the nefarious "Joker," was still running around free in Iraq.

"We have attempted to protect the public from the horrible truth until now," said Pentagon spokesperson Gen. Amos Halftrack. "As is often the case with corrupt fascistic governments, prettyboy figureheads—like Saddam Hussein—are made frontmen for the real enemy. In Iraq, the real power is, and has always been held by the Joker."

With no other name for the suspected Iraqi dictator, U.S. forces and Iraqi police have begun circulating cards with the only known picture of the fugitive, to be added to existing packs of Iraq's "most wanted" cards, and possibly placed in special protective packaging since they're quite collectible. According to the White House, the Joker is behind Saturday's Fallujah jailbreak and other acts of resistance following the capture of Saddam Hussein.

"It was previously believed Saddam Hussein was behind the resistance cells still waging attacks on our troops," said press secretary Scott McClellan, "but that information had been gathered by U.S. intelligence, and we all know how that goes. I'm not saying they're two steps behind or anything, but the latest information they've obtained says Ruben Stoddard is the winner of last year's American Idol."

New information about the Joker sheds a new light on the war in Iraq, the White House claims, and election strategists advise the war on terror could be severely complicated by the revelation. Efforts to find the Joker might be accelerated to locate and arrest the superstar terrorist between now and November.

Reporters lucky enough to get a front seat at the press conference, while some of us were jammed up near the exit door in the back, asked McClellan about rumors he started that the Joker and 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden were linked.

"Almost certainly," McClellan agreed. "We have intelligence verifying it."

Saturday brought more bad news out of Iraq, as an attack on a county jail by resistance forces killed at least 25 people, mostly Iraqi police, and wounded more than 30. The number of prisoners freed numbered in the "plenty" range, but at least a quarter of them were speculated to be town drunks and parking violators. The Saturday raid was also believed plotted by the Joker.

"We're talking about an insane criminal mastermind," the Pentagon confirmed Sunday. "Most of those who were wounded were overcome by his deadly laughing gas, while several were killed by exploding pumpkin bombs. Or something. Make no mistake, the Joker is the greatest threat to world peace since Hitler—no, no! Napoleon. Napoleon. He was a sick bastard."

Even the arrest of number 41 on the most-wanted Iraqis list brought no joy to U.S. forces. The so-called "four of spades" Mohammed Zimam Abdul Razaq was picked up in a Baghdad suburb Sunday for the misdemeanor offense of threatening a cash machine that ate up his ATM card. The Pentagon expressed mixed feelings about it.

"It's number forty-one, for crying out loud," said Gen. Halftrack. "Nobody shits their britches over the forty-first NFL draft pick."

All that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.

But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.

The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.

Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's, it was glass eating. Linebacker Greg Luzinski started the trend when he accidentally ate an entire beer mug while drunk, thinking it was a beer popsicle. The trend spread across the nation at the speed of stupid and before long college kids everywhere were eating light bulbs whenever they didn't have time for a sit-down meal. University facilities budgets went through the roof and Charmin released a new line of red toilet paper that hid evidence of inconvenient anal bleeding. Unfortunately, the fad proved short lived when Luzinski did, dropping dead of a glassasscopy in 1977.

Every decade, or pseudo-decade, also has its brilliant way to bilk doofuses out of their cash, and the 70's version was the pet rock. Created by a California inventor who dreamed of finding a way to turn the rocks on his front lawn into weed, and unleashed on a public tired of feeding freeloading animals and starving African children, the pet rock was an enormous hit among Americans who didn't know what to get their brother's kids for Christmas. The versatile pet rock also served a dual purpose, both as a gag gift and a weapon to be thrown at gag gifters.

No overview of 70's fads would be complete without a mention of disco, which was not so much a fad as aural wallpaper for the fad of the 1970's themselves. What more can be said about the most misguided musical idea since Mozart's tuba sonata? Not much, though in all fairness you could do worse if you want a soundtrack for doing cocaine and screwing your sister. What you couldn't do much worse than, however, is "Disco Duck," 1976's answer to New Age theories that there was no Satan.

As you're probably starting to catch on, everything in the 1970's was a fad, and thank God. One of the more embarrassing was the practice of talking to plants, originated by hard-up stoners chanting "Grow, weed, grow!" to their closet garden creations and crossing over to the flakiest strata of the mainstream, who took the April 1st edition of Scientific American at face value. Other notable fads originated in this "April Fool's" issue include aromatherapy and cancer research.

Nixon brought acupuncture back with him from China like a rat in his suitcase, and this fad spread faster than you could stick a sewing needle into a yuppie's ass. While certainly high on unintentional humor factor, acupuncture sacrificed some of its usefulness as a fad by looking really uncomfortable and causing people to cringe at the same time as they were laughing at the yoyos being stuck with the needles.

The 70's fad that probably least deserved to die was EST therapy, a revolutionarily hilarious idea based on putting the patient into a room full of assholes and yelling at them. The suicide rate during treatment was 100%, and as a result the fragile members of the species were weeded out of the herd in time for the alpha dog orgy known as the 1980's. The psychiatric profession has seldom known a treatment so efficient or fun to watch, and EST will be sorely missed.

The 70's also saw the invention of the hacky sack, which finally gave American teens something to do while they were in college. George Abrams, the inventor of the sack, was inspired by watching a Massachusetts mental patient who would compulsively kick himself in the nuts as if he were playing one of those ball-string-and-paddle games. Abrams was struck with the idea of how fun this might be if in didn't involve getting kicked in the balls so much, and something sort of like a sport was born.

While 8-tracks, CB radios and hideous string art creations all held their own as ridiculous 70's time-wasters, the moped really takes the cake as the defining piece of 1970's crap. With all the danger and inconvenience of a bicycle, but none of the exercise, the moped captured the cheap-assed imaginations of a country that thought gas was expensive. Hundreds of thousands of mopeds were sold during the Mideast oil embargo in 1973, with every last one of them being traded away for pocket fuzz and spare buttons at garage sales or pushed off a cliff six months later when the Arabs turned the gas tap back on. Which, if you've ever tried to ride a bike in bellbottoms, you know was probably the best thing that happened during the 70's.

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