Gnu Whirled Hors d'Oeuvres

When Prime Minister Abe Shinzō visits Washington next week, he will be the guest too late to save the deteriorating party.

A squinting and (punch)drunk President Bush (possibly standing so as to try to block the view of the slouched-over form of Alberto Gonzalez) will greet him in a White House done up in Norwegian Wood Style ("She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere. So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.") Beside him will be Actual President Richard Cheney and..."Darn, Condi said she would be here."

Gone will be the 600 who rode with the president into the valley of death: Wolfowitz, Armitage, Bolton, Powell, Kelly, Green,(yes, that's intentional) Feith, Snow, Snow, Card, Lawless, Baker, Joseph, Zoellick...so many gone...

Replaced they will be with a whistling, smiling Democratic Party clean up crew poking through the wreckage, gleefully tallying up the costs to the Republican Party of its six years of excess and measuring the size of the windows in the Oval Office.

Outside of the United States, the Merry Men of Bush's Sure-would Forest ("Sure would like to to see me some WMD's!") are all either banged up, kicked out or headed out the door. Former President Aznar sounds ever more like a man with only his moustache for company; Prime Minister Berlusconi has all the time to work on his tan, get his eyes fixed and apologize to his wife; Tony Blair is on his last lap (and not a victory lap either) and John Howard, the man who managed to hang on as prime minister during the greatest economic expansion his country has ever known (a political genius, I tell you) has finally annoyed enough of his fair dinkum countrymen to possibly get sent to the sheep dip.

So the Prime Minister Abe, after years of apprenticeship as "the American Enterprise Institute candidate" will arrive at the great center of Western Civilzation with his Nipponocon message of fury ("Hun Sen, will you stand beside me as I demand the truth about the 17 of my countrymen who disappeared?" "Uh, Shinzō, I was a member of the Khmer Rouge.") only to find nothing but lettuce in the salad bowl and the remaining guacamole an unappetizing shade of brown.

And if that weren't enough, some smartass with a press pass (who let this rabble in here?) will ask annoying crap like "Why did your Cabinet on March 16 issue a Cabinet Decision (kakugi kettei) saying that the Kono Statement has never been the subject of a Cabinet Decision and your Cabinet is not thinking of making it the subject of a Cabinet Decision? What's up with that?"

Oh, the injustice of it all.