We live, it is often said, in a Golden Age of political satire. Our modern day Swifts: our Leno, our Colbert, our Gallagher, have unprecedented standing in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. And yet, despite their supposed influence, the net effect of their efforts is zero. After years of ridicule, George Bush remains in office, more powerful than ever and less and less interested in the “Tonight Show” with each passing hour.
As regular readers of the Old Yorker know, we have been following Lenin’s famous dictum to “go another way” and have been publishing naughty limericks about the president with the express goal of forcing George Bush to cry “no mas” and resign his office, leaving the presidency in the hands of Dick Cheney, a man whose last name is much harder to rhyme with than “Bush.”
Here then, the next limerick in our arsenal. This one appears to allude to the president’s time at Yale University, where he was considered something of a “card.”
A sexy young prexy from Yale
Was hung, it was said, like a whale.
But oft he would wish,
he weren’t limp as a fish,
for what was the point being male?
