Listen, it's not our fault the Neo-Conservative movement is falling apart, and it's no good saying it is!
 
Yes, yes, we know the administration's current plans seem to be going to hell faster than a perjured parson, but that's no reason to panic and start tossing blame all over the place. It's got nothing to do with us and we're not having any part of it!
 
Besides, we weren't even there when it happened. At the time, your W Team was in the Chez W lunchroom, drafting an urgent plea to the First Lady, imploring her to write her own semi-tell-all memoir like smarty-bloomers Hillary Clinton.
 
It's time to take back some much-needed Republican thunder, and we have complete faith in Mrs. Bush's ability to do the job. Just because she's begun to exhibit the slightly glazed and vaguely alarmed look reminiscent of the end-of-term Pat Nixon doesn't mean she can't!
 
Why, even if her account were only half as true as Mrs. Clinton's--something we think unlikely--it'd still be a whale of a tale, and you can bet on that. At last, we'd have an insider's peek into the machinations of government; an opportunity to rip off--as it were--the skin of the sausage and see what lies beneath.
 
We're telling you, with the right approach this book could be big, BIG, BIG! But it will need a little direction and moxie if it is to do as well as the latest Harry Potter Satanist tract.
 
With that thought in mind, we trust it will not offend the First Lady if we suggest a few topics and titles we believe might make this work the smash-hit we know it can be. Here is what we think it will look like when it's finished.
 
Chapter 2: THE SWORD OF ISLAM
In this second chapter (chapter one, about her early married life, is a little depressing), Mrs. Bush discusses her life at the time of her husband's leadership of the Afghan and Iraqi conflicts. She shares with us her pride in the way our leader brilliantly concluded both wars--long before they were over. But she is frank in acknowledging the terror felt by all in the first frenzied days of the Iraqi campaign, in light of the horrified discovery of weapons so terrible that they could destroy a great nation even though they didn't actually exist.
 
Imagine how much worse the damage might have been had they been real!
 
And for the first time, La Donna Numero Uno discusses the dark hours of 9/11, and admits the discomfort endured as she loyally accompanied her husband at his command posts in the bunker and under the bed.
 
This chapter also makes clear the toll these wars have taken on the President. For, whereas many brave soldiers died only once, the President has done so a thousand times.
 
Chapter 3: A DREAM OF EMPIRE
This is the stirring account of the earliest and most alarming phase of the battle for Iraq, when it appeared that insufficient planning and overweening arrogance on the part of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had undermined our military strength and capabilities to the point of possible defeat!
 
And along the way the First Lady amusingly recounts a few of the unusually colorful pet names bestowed by the President upon Mr. Rumsfeld on that occasion.
 
And in this chapter we learn that, although the President is vehemently opposed to nation building, he has no such objections to nation rehabbing, and thus we come to understand the creation of AmerIraq(tm), a wholly owned joint subsidiary of the Gulf and Bechtel Corporations.
 
And there is further comic relief in the charmingly cheeky antics of the tamed Iraqi clerics and others who had been promised eventual control of the quondam Mesopotamia. And we watch, fascinated as they slowly realize they will forever be on the outside looking in, their little noses pressed against the windows of their expected offices. And we laugh to hear the imaginative curses subsequently inveighed against the President, his grandmother and succeeding generations unto the fourth millenium.
 
Chapter 4: THE TOMB OF MAMMON
Here light is finally shed on the President's lonely battle, aided only by a few score thousand lobbyists and White House staffers, to wrest some simulacrum of a tax cut from the jaws of a Congress that, though cowed, was not crazy.
 
We applaud the Commander-in-Chief's ingenuity when, faced with massive reductions of the cut itself, he rallies brilliantly by successfully removing benefits for the children and the poor. And our hearts are warmed by the subsequent gratitude of the now richer rich as they shower campaign contributions upon Mr. Bush's head like the gentle and abundant rain.
 
 
These suggestions should be enough to get the project started. When published it will be the fullest account to date of the pathos, frustration and fear that is a part of sharing a life with this President--something with which we might all empathize.
 
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: With this edition, your genial author will absent himself for a much needed, and probably undeserved, sabbatical, during which I will be doing a spot of travel and a spot of stirring up trouble--more of the latter than the former. The present deponent will return, brightly tailed and Bush-eyed, in late September, Until then: don't take any wooden candidates!
 
Hank