We have to admit that, after attacking George Bush with filthy limericks for more than two months, the president remains largely unscathed and the Republican Party appears resurgent under comeback kid John McCain, while the Democratic contenders are engaged in a struggle like that of Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, which seems certain to send them both plummeting into the abyss.

The probability that the Republicans will continue in power in November is approaching unity. This despite a weekly limerick that attacked the president on everything from the consistency of his ejaculate to the disproportionate heft of his left testicle when compared with his right one. We know from anecdotal evidence that our dirty limericks were the talk of Georgetown society and that Sally Quinn even embroidered one into a throw pillow as a Christmas gift for Buffy Cafritz. Perhaps our proudest moment came when several of our limericks were read into the Congressional Record by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) during a late night session.

All for naught.

Next week, we will begin a new feature, “The Happy Ending Project,” which will revise famous works of literature and art so as to make them more cheerful and upbeat.

Until then, we leave you with one final dirty limerick about George Bush, which shows, we hope, that we can acknowledge our defeat like gentlemen and admit that, for now, the president is the better man.

Mr. Bush has a cock quite malevolent,
That’s fucked every species but elephant!
A pathological prick
in no humans he’d stick,
So to Laura he’s grown quite irrelevant.

You may wonder if our use of the limerick form is not in and of itself an insult to the president. Au contraire. Sure, the limerick may be humble bit of doggerel. But we would submit that, in their way, the impressively endowed chap from Nantucket and the girl from Rangoon with the flatulence problem are more memorable characters than Emma Bovary. The company they keep may lack the refinement of the provincial petit bourgeoisie but we say with pride that we are more at home with them and their friends the lusty swain from Duluth and that girl with the detachable leg. What was her name again? Peg, perhaps.

Here, then, is this week’s limerick:

A middle-aged feller called George
Enjoyed making love in the morgue
Although the women were cold
And some very old
They never failed to make his penis engorge

Last Friday’s lunch was a first in that the conversation was dominated by an outsider, a mentally unstable woman who presented herself at our offices and demanded to speak with someone about our relentless campaign to drive President Bush from office using obscene limericks. After being directed to the conference room, the woman burst in and proceeded to excoriate all present for the Old Yorker’s dirty limericks about George Bush.

“I love the Old Yorker,” she began. “But I can’t stand what you’re doing to the president. It’s disrespectful.”

The explanation we gave to her before escorting her to the door is worth repeating here. For the record, then, we do not hate George Bush. We respect the office that he holds and we admire him personally for his triumph over alcoholism and his many other accomplishments. We don’t believe that President Bush is unintelligent and we know that we would find him charming if we met him.

And, as people of faith ourselves, we share the president’s religious views and are prayerfully grateful to him for making his beliefs such a significant part of his public life.

In short, we think George Bush is great. We just don’t want him to be president anymore and, to that end, we are publishing scurrilous limericks about him with the promise to stop if he resigns the presidency.

Here is this week’s limerick:

Bush had a gay lover called Betzel
Who hailed from the village of Wetzel.
He did a lewd dance
And pulled down his pants
And said, “Hey, Prez, come choke on my pretzel!”

Apparently, in order to tell us what he assumed we wanted to hear, the source exaggerated the extent to which President Bush was cowed by our dirty limericks. Although we have confirmed independently that the president is a regular reader of this page, he is not, we are now told, preparing to resign his office in order to stop us making sport of him.

There is no denying that it is a bitter blow to learn that we are no closer to our goal than we at the outset of our limerick campaign. Still, we will not be discouraged and we will not give up. And, to prove it, we have prepared an exceptionally vile limerick that we think will convince certain skeptics in the White House that we mean exactly what we say: it is time for you to go, Mr. President.

There was a Commander-in-Chief
whose fornication duration was brief.
The second he’d skim
the soft skin of a quim,
he’d explode like a skiff on a reef!

But that is neither here nor there.

Bush’s departure means that, in his place, Dick Cheney will occupy the Oval Office, perhaps not an ideal outcome but one that we have anticipated after a review of the relevant documents and historical precedents.

So our work is not done.

The vice president, we are told, is even more thin-skinned than the president which makes him an ideal target for the next phase of our campaign. Here then a special double-barreled blast in Vice President Cheney’s general direction.

Dick Cheney’s a Wyoming patrician
who partakes of that great state’s traditions.
What he finds the most fun?
As many buttplugs as guns!
His twin loves go on all hunting missions!

Now its rumored when Dick was in Texas
shooting, drinking, and driving his Lexus,
that the great orb in his ass
slipped and dropped on the grass
so a face and some shot found a nexus!

Word has reached us through well-placed sources at the White House that our six-week effort to force President Bush from office by publishing bawdy verse about him is finally bearing fruit. Our source confirms that the president has been reading our posts and, earlier this week, asked Attorney General Mukasey to draft a letter of resignation for the president. It seems that last week’s limerick struck a nerve with a mention of Abu Ghraib prison and the notorious atrocities that took place there.

This week we strike again at the president’s Achilles Heel with another poem on the same subject in the hope that, if Bush has not definitely decided to resign, this one will push him off the fence.

While visiting Abu Ghraib
Bush took a stroll in the neighb
It’s pronounced, “Abu Ghraib”
Said a colonel named Jeb
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Still, we remain undeterred and throw down this gantlet to our “friends” on the left. If you can do better, either in limerick form or in haiku or sonnet or whatever you like, then “Lay on, McDuff!”

Here, then, is our latest dirty limerick about George Bush:

Abu Ghraib, Bush said, is just not
the best place in Iraq as a spot.
Those images are a torrent
of treatment abhorrent,
that is, if “abhorrent” means hot!

To outward appearances, at any rate, George Bush remains comfortably ensconced in office, with no indication that he is even aware of our limerick campaign. So, while our overall strategy (to force George Bush to resign the Presidency by means of dirty limericks) remains the same, our tactics have shifted. The Old Yorker is preparing a “Limerick Surge” which will see an increase in both the frequency and the number of our poetic assaults.

We did not seek this conflict, Mr. President. But, now that battle has been joined, we shall not relent until total victory is ours!

George Bush, it is said, has a mission
To eat pussy as a form of nutrition
but with women he’s queasy
preferring ladyboy shehe’s
and a game he calls “Extraordinary Rendition.”

For the record, then, no, the Old Yorker’s dirty limericks have yet not forced President Bush to resign the Presidency and, when they do, you will probably hear about it, so there’s no need to keep pestering us with e-mail asking whether or not the president is still in office. Until you hear otherwise, you should assume that he is.

Like Democracy itself, reading the Old Yorker comes with both rights and responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is not to act like an ass. One of the rights is to enjoy our cutting edge material on a regular basis. Here then, the latest of our “Dirty Limericks about George Bush.

There was a young fellow named Bush
Who liked to make love in the tush
One day a young lass
Asked, “George, why always the ass?”
Quoth Bush, “That’s what makes my dogs mush!”

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?