acing charges of pandering to Southerners by affecting a fake drawl when speaking to audiences in the South, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton responded to reporters this week with an angry retort of "Shoo, I ayne got no suuthurn assent, y'all" before spitting on the floor and leaving the room.

This latest incident follows a strong trend for Clinton over the last few weeks, leading pundits to suggest she's attempting to poach votes from Democratic challenger and authentic southerner John Edwards, knowing full well that a Democrat who can't carry the South has as much of a chance at the presidency as a black man from… oh. Nevermind.

Adding fuel to the fiery allegations, Clinton appeared at a rally in Raleigh last week wearing a NASCAR hat, and proceeded to pepper her speech with references to country music songs by Clint Black and Toby Keith. Even more strikingly, Clinton spoke to a group of campaign donors in Charleston a few days later, smoking a pipe and ordering around several people of color dressed as servants onstage.

"I don't know where she gets her ideas," questioned Tim Linenbrook, Professor of Cultural Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "No one in recorded history, Southern or otherwise, has ever acted like Hillary apparently thinks we Southerners act. In spite of having lived in Arkansas for years, she seems to have formed her impression of the South from a mix of Deliverance and The Dukes of Hazzard."

Clinton's detractors insist this is not a new behavior for the senator from New York, citing numerous incidents in which the former first lady appeared to pander to African-American audiences by incorporating clichéd and very incorrect forms of Ebonics into her speech and adopting very broadly stereotypical behaviors. The most notorious example of which may have been an appearance in Chicago in March, when Clinton ended her speech by shouting "Fuck tha police!" and tossing buckets of KFC into the crowd.

Leaders from the Latino community in Los Angeles also took issue with Clinton's decision to issue her entire speech at that campaign stop in the form of graffiti spray-painted onto road signs above the 405 freeway.

Valley girl advocates (yes, they exist, and we found them) also charge that Clinton pulled the same trick when speaking at a fundraiser in Orange County three weeks ago, popping her gum loudly while speaking about Medicare and using the word "like" seventy-eight times over the course of four minutes.

"What-EVER," Clinton responded when questioned about her dubious Southern California speech patterns.

Political pundits across the spectrum, however, admit that they're on the edge of their seats in anticipation of Clinton's upcoming speaking engagement in Whippany, New Jersey, a town noted for its unusually high concentration of Kazak immigrants, since Clinton is rumored to do an absolutely killer Borat impression.

h, baby, there’s being a girl and then there’s being a girl—know what I’m saying? Take as an example former CIA Director George Tenet, the man who complains in his new book At the Center of the Storm that he became a poster boy for the fuck-up in Iraq and that his comment "It’s a Slam Dunk, Mr. President," was used as grounds for the Iraqi invasion and taken out of context. Now it turns out that, according to Tenet’s new book, the problem is trying to use sports terminology in the workplace without knowing shit about sports.

Like a lot of women out there, this reporter only watches sports for the unspoken erotic tension between the players and the frequent male touching. But honey, at least I watch. Which leaves straight boys like George Tenet trying to fumble (another sports term) around the office to describe international situations in a language the president can understand. If he don’t know sports and the president don’t know international politics, they might as well be speaking Swahili and German to each other, sweetie.

In Tenet’s new book, the freshest alibi that testifies he’s someone else who didn’t do shit to cause the unpopular war in Iraq, the former CIA Director tells how he responded to the president’s question about the intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD is so 2003 now), to which Tenet replied with the damned expression "Slam Dunk." But Tenet says the case against him is not so clear.

"The president likes to receive all of his briefings in language that the public can understand," Tenet wrote of his former boss and frequent sly critic. "This makes it easier for the razor-sharp mind of President Bush to prepare information for his press conferences—with so many things on his plate like writing a balanced budget, researching the privatization of health care, and his late-night situation meetings, sports terminology can get the point home to the American people without the president complicating the matter with the convoluted jargon familiar to President Bush, but strange to our ears.

"In this matter, I incorrectly clarified the intelligence case for Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction as a ’Slam Dunk.’ I have very rarely ever seen a football game, so using this terminology was my mistake. I should have gone with ’home run,’ which is at least familiar to me because of dating slang. I did not mean that the ball was knocked out of the park. I meant that that thing happens where—what’s the term for when a player pretends to throw the ball, but you’re not sure he did, and any player could have or not have the ball? A ’clusterfuck,’ maybe? Whatever that thing is, that’s what I meant to say. Boy, I must have really messed up my sports lingo, though."

Tenet’s book further criticizes politicians out there, including the White House, for making him the scapegoat for the war because of the "Slam Dunk" comment. When the intelligence for Iraq was revealed as faulty, detractors pointed to Tenet as the face for the flawed intelligence system and put the burden on him and his people for a war that many accusers say was initiated only by the president’s interests. Tenet goes on to describe the process as "just plain mean."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was uncharacteristically frank in her response to Tenet’s charges in her response with Wolf Blitzer on CNN Sunday.

"George screwed the pooch and he knows it," said Rice. "That’s not a sports term, so maybe I won’t have to translate it for him. We should send him to the penalty box for his knocking us over it all, but he wouldn’t know where the fuck it is anyway."

Once again, sir, I am confounded by a mystery by which I've already been confounded. For I have returned to the place of my last great defeat—Brunsley, Idaho, well known to all its inhabitants and supernatural buffs as the Bermuda Shorts Triangle.

Before you foul-mouthed skeptics can say, "Fuck this bullshit" and return to searching for more Internet info about that movie with the Dakota Fanning rape scene, I urge you to think about this: What would you do if there were a 12-block radius in a moderate-sized town where your finest undergarments mysteriously disappeared? That's right, such a place really exists, and it's in Brunsley, Idaho. Seldom can a man, or especially an attractive woman, walk from the Bed, Bath and Beyond to the Citgo gas station with their underpants untouched. Even the most conservative among you will find you go from securely hammocked to freeballing in record time, with no answer as to where your Fruit of the Looms have gone.

I first stumbled across this mystery in 1998, just before I founded the commune. In fact, all of my first columns were about this puzzler, though I decided to withhold my claims before I had any solid proof because I wanted to write a kick-ass bestseller about the phenomenon, and didn't want any competition drawn to my big moneyhole by an ill-timed commune column. If only I had known how few people read the commune, despites its being available for free on the Internet, I would have thrown caution to the wind, as well as my columns, and published them as a warning to all underwear-lovers who might wander into the area.

I discovered it quite by accident, when I attended Brunsley's annual Halloween Dunk-the-Witch contest. I'll save all the anticipation by saying it turned out to be a woman in a costume; but while my search for proof of horrible Wiccans ended up a dead-end, when I went to buy a drink at a local café they call Starbucks here, I found my BVD's didn't make it across the street with me. I went searching for pocket change for my $3.50 cup of coffee and found the fabric between my digits and my goodies a lot thinner than expected—only pocket stood between my finger and my boys.

I knew I hadn't taken them off, so of course, I looked to the simplest answer—an underpants pickpocket. But the locals told me of the Bermuda Shorts Triangle, a 12-block perfect circle in which all manner of undergarments mysteriously disappear. Or as my colleague Dennis at the Wendy's in that area summarized, "Yeah, people end up losing their skivvies all the time around here." Of course, the name is something of a misnomer, since it's not a triangle-shaped area, and if you're wearing Bermuda Shorts they actually make it through the area without being stolen—underwear only appear fair game. But you have to admit, it's damn catchier than "The Circle of Panty Theft."

The first time I passed that way, I was close to launching the commune, and had to return to attend to that business after losing over $400 in underwear in my attempt to solve the riddle. But now the commune is successful, by my own narrow definitions, and I can at last return to figuring out where these shorts are going, maybe even why. Thanks to my painstaking statistics as of last time, I can tell you panties are taken more frequently than male briefs, and boxers are taken least frequently while thongs seem to disappear more than anything else. Expensive underwear and cheap underwear tend to be taken indiscriminately. I only really tested this underthing-theft on myself, but my survey of victims revealed women were targeted more frequently than men, even men wearing thongs, but it seemed to happen across gender and age lines. You've got to admit, outside of discovering where these undershorts are disappearing to, why they are being taken, and how to prevent it, I've practically got this case fully answered.

Like many people that work here, I'm starting to wish I had never founded the commune. Sure, disseminating the truth to the masses is an important job, maybe the most important of them all next to the man who maintains erections on pornographic movie sets. But still, it keeps me up at nights knowing the great mysteries—like who's stealing the underwear in Brunsley, Idaho by the Bennigan's—are going unsolved because I chose this different path.

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