merica awoke this week to find itself trapped in a shitty Groundhog Day nightmare, thanks to a recent AP poll showing that if the election were held today, President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry would tie, with human Muppet Ralph Nader playing the spoiler once again by garnering 6 percent of the vote. These results were eerily and shittily similar to the 2000 Presidential election, when Bush won despite losing the popular vote, thanks in part to Nader siphoning off liberal voters and Bush’s brother Jeb taking a big, wet crap on the Constitution to ensure his brother would carry the crucial state of Florida.

Within moments of the Associated Press poll results being made public, Americans everywhere were comparing their feelings of nauseating year-2000 déjà vu to the 1993 Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a news weatherman doomed to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. How this phenomenon might be possible for an entire nation on a four-year scale is not yet understood, though faerie magic has yet to be completely disproved. Regardless of the cause, non-Republicans everywhere agree that America needs to make some kind of major soul-searching change to prevent waking up in 2005 to hear “I Got You Babe� playing on clock radios across the country.

“Fuck! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!� fumed an epileptically frustrated Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe upon hearing the results of the poll, a replay of the 2000 election searing his brain stem like a cattle brand. Similar sentiments echoed across the nation this week as Democrats and the non-rich envisioned a bizarre replay of the last presidential election, with Gore being swapped out for Democratic nominee John Kerry like some kind of bad Hollywood script for a time-traveling comedy.

“I don’t know if Kerry will be able to pull off what Gore did,� mused confident-sounding political pundit Prance Nancley. “Al Gore could have won that election in his sleep, after all he was running against a Mr. Potato Head doll. But Gore still somehow managed to drop the ball and kick it all the way down the street, allowing so-called adult George W. to sneak into the White House while the door was ajar and Gore was off looking for his ball. I don’t think Kerry has that kind of comedy in him. He is rather dull.�

Still, the possible scenario of an election repeat has haunted more than a few Democrat dreams this week, with Kerry taking the place of Gore as the respectable, though thoroughly boring democratic hopeful who somehow loses to Bush on a technicality, after Florida’s governor declares that blacks don’t have the right to vote in his state any more.

The lone encouraging note in all this is that according to the same AP poll, politics aren’t the only area in which America is trapped in a loop of déjà vu, as the AP cites “current� top-grossing films The Grinch, Cast Away and Mission Impossible 2, and has ‘N Sync, Santana and Eminem topping the album charts, which clearly isn’t true.

Is it?

ccording to director Mel Gibson, film critics from across the nation have proven their fealty with the dark lord Satan by panning his latest film The Passion of the Christ, a gruesome religious horror flick released to overwhelmingly negative critical response last week. This novel reaction to film criticism has raised questions nationwide over whether the 48-year-old actor and filmmaker is merely berserkly fanatical, or just completely insane. Not helping Gibson's cause is the director's non-figurative conviction that Satan tried to keep his film from being made, and might have succeeded if not for the intervention of the Holy Ghost. Unfortunately for Gibson, the Holy Ghost was unable to prevent Satan from pointing out to film critics the film's turgid tone, plodding pacing, uneven characterization and excessively pointless violence.

"They are the forces of Satan or the dupes of Satan," Gibson offered charitably, giving non-fans the choice of being either evil or stupid.

"Holy shit was that a bad movie," disagreed Satan's minion Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times, who must've been typing his review while drenched in lamb's blood. "That piece of shit was worse than We Were Soldiers."

The film opened to sellout crowds after months of speculation that it was going to be really offensive to Jews, generated by Gibson cashing in on his "Jews Killed Jesus" Catholic offshoot faith and his father's reputation as a notorious Holocaust denier to market the film with the catchy tagline "The Jews Hate It," despite the fact that no religious groups had seen or commented on the film at that point.

In interviews, Gibson has explained that his Traditionalist Catholic faith, which rejects the Vatican's exoneration of the Jewish race for the death of Christ, grows from his bond with his father Hutton Gibson. In either a brilliant marketing ploy or disturbing evidence of inner turmoil, Gibson's answers to requests to clarify his own stance on the Holocaust have been rambling and evasive.

Unable to go five whole minutes without saying something unnervingly kooky, however, Gibson's response to New York Times writer Frank Rich's article pointing out that the director was inventing nonexistent Jewish outrage to market his film was like something straight out of The Passion itself. "I wanted to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick. I want to kill his dog." Luckily for Gibson, from all reports Rich's dog is one of those "turn the other cheek" sorts who is unlikely to accuse the director of speaking for Satan.

The relentlessly masochistic tone of Gibson's film has caused some to ponder the director's obsession with torture, as evidenced by the mandatory torture sequences contained in nearly every film in which Gibson has appeared. From being electrocuted in Lethal Weapon and drawn and quartered in Braveheart, Gibson even went so far as to insist on adding an unscripted toe-smashing scene to Brian Helgeland's Payback. Though he was unsuccessful in similar attempts to add a testicular electrocution scene to the chickflick hit What Women Want, it was not for lack of trying.

Meanwhile, The Passion's large opening box office is sure to inspire imitators, and early word that such knock-offs as The Passion of the Weekend at Bernie's and Friday the 13th XI: Run, Jesus, Run are already in the works. Additional reports hint at an upcoming franchise of movies where Belgian marshal arts expert Jean-Claude Van Damme will beat the shit out of Jesus for two hours in various exotic locales. Whether the makers of those films will be able to pull off Gibson's brass-balled bluster, claiming that critics of The Passion's blitzkrieg of violence are merely deficient in character and unable to handle the power of his flawless cinema, may well depend on how closely they can duplicate that crazy look in his eyes.

I am in no mood to talk, gentle readers. Fortunately I can do my column in a written fashion, although it throws me off my game not to hear my own voice ranting as I freestyle my diatribe. But my voice hurts too much to even think about talking—see? That just now hurt really bad. I am sick with the influenza.

At least that's what doctors tell me. I have much darker suspicions that I have been infected with the CIA's latest death virus.

Doctors, friends, and those folks at the radio call-in show are quick to doubt me, I know, but it only makes my suspicions stronger. They ask me, "Why would the CIA waste time trying to kill you?" Of course, that question has a list of answers a mile long. There's my controversial columns which someone must be reading, influencing a whole generation of hypothetical readers toward an underground revolution. Or there's what I did last year in the city of Branson, Missouri's water supply. And these two things are only at the top of the list. Frankly, who knows? They're the CIA. I don't pretend to understand their motivations, even as I make them up.

All that matters is this may well be true. As you may know, the CIA are not to be fucked with, sir, when it comes to death viruses. They invented the best of them—AIDS, syphilis, Hong Kong flu, herpes. I hear tell one of them even escaped the lab and got a talk show under the name Jenny Jones. These people are clearly the go-to folks when it comes to inventing death viruses. And if this one is their latest, it stands to reason I'm in big, contagious trouble.

The doctor was right about one thing—nothing you can do but let it run its course. So I'm taking a fatalistic approach to it all, I suppose, saying what happens happens. Of course, this doesn't stop me from making our Marketing VP Sully work on a cure 24 hours a day, minus lunch. I've also cursed the name of God for letting this happen and trashed a church, but I was probably going to do that anyway.

The worst thing about any cold, even a death virus, is being sick all the time. Snotty, sore throat, always rushing to the bathroom at the drop of a hat, or something less hat-like. Everything in my office is germ-ridden and nasty. I've gotten the commune cleaning staff (a.k.a. the copywriting desk) to come in and scrub down my office every two hours, just to keep it less contagious—also, I admit, I'm a little curious to see how quick they catch it, to see what this death virus can really do. I've also had them empty all my jars of urine, since when they began to get in the way I had to confess I really didn't have much idea what I was saving them for.

In the even of my death, however, seeing as how this is a death virus, I believe the commune will be in good hands. I've assigned editorial duties to Sully, Mazie the Chicken, Lil Duncan, and celebrity heartthrob Leif Garrett, just to shake things up a bit. Each will have the reigning editorial duties on a certain day of the month, from first to fourth. On the event of a rare fifth Monday, responsibility for those duties will be determined by a battle to the death. Perhaps a bit extreme, but I'm damned to determine to see the creative control doesn't suffer due to my brother's meddling and the CIA's attempt to kill me.

Sure, I suppose I could get better, but you have to plan for the worst. After all, this all probably could have been avoided if I had invested in that hermetically-sealed personal bubble I planned on buying after seeing that John Travolta movie all those years ago.

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