Aristotle: So, Mr. President, or can I call you George?
Bush: Well, if you call me George, what do I call you, Arie?
Aristotle: Just call me The Philosopher. So what do I call you?
Bush: Just call me The Thinker.
Aristotle: O.K., Thinker. So you think "Intelligent Design" should be taught in the schools. But just what do you mean by that?
Bush: Well, smarty pants Philosopher, what I mean is that some Supreme Being makes sure that nothing happens without there being an intelligent design.
Aristotle: And just who would that be?
Bush: Actually, it’s Dick Cheney.
Aristotle: Then you think there was an intelligent design behind the war in Iraq?
Bush: Precisely. And I was present at the creation.
Aristotle: Well, in hindsight, wouldn’t you agree that this is more like "idiotic design"?
Bush: I take that personally. Intelligent design is faith based, and we have to take the invasion of Iraq on faith. It’s like my entire administration, all the result of "intelligent design" based on faith.
Aristotle: Your government is broke, penniless. You are hated throughout the world, you have messed up the war on terror and you have no ideas. Tell me, how this is intelligent design?
Bush: Remember how things were when I got in. There was a surplus and America had pulled its troops out of Bosnia. What a terrible state of affairs. Well, we all sat around and I asked, "What can we do about this?" and Cheney said, "Let’s pray."
Aristotle: So you prayed?
Bush: We prayed for an intelligent design to come down and put it all right, which it did. In no time, we had a gigantic deficit and several unmanageable wars. You gotta believe.
Aristotle: What are your plans now:
Bush: More intelligent design. We plan to nuke Iran, spend trillions on stupid projects and I have given Greenspan total freedom to destroy the economy.
Aristotle: And who is the Supreme Being behind all of this?
Bush: The ultimate one, the great power, the creator, the architect.
Aristotle: You mean….?
Bush: Exactly. Karl Rove.
Aristotle: So what you are advocating is that children in public schools accept that Karl Rove is the Supreme Being behind intelligent design.
Bush: He is omniscient. How else did he know who Valerie Plame was?
Aristotle: Maybe a little birdie told him.
Bush: O.K. a little humor never hurts. But I think it is really important to be exposed to differing ideas.
Aristotle: If that’s so, how come you and your entire team shut up everyone who said Saddam Hussein had no WMDs?
Bush: Well, I never said you should be exposed to ideas that contradicted the intelligent design. That would contradict the whole concept. If the design is intelligent, than all opposition to it is, by logic, stupid. People like that deserve to be trashed, or fired.
Aristotle: What if they are under cover for the C.I.A?
Bush: No problem. Intelligent design blows the cover of the untrustworthy. Get with the team or get lost.
Aristotle: You haven’t really discussed the role of the Almighty, apart from Cheney and Rove.
Bush: You’re looking at him.
Aristotle: You mean…
Bush: Take a good look, bub. You never heard of the Trinity?
Aristotle: Don’t you think this is stretching it a bit?
Bush: Hey, I didn’t put Tom DeLay in there. Consider yourself lucky.
Aristotle: But what about the theory of evolution?
Bush: No problem. I’m all for natural selection, as long as I do the selecting. And when I do it, it is by intelligent design, so the selection is natural.
Aristotle: So you’ve got it all figured out.
Bush: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of a new novel, The Immortalists, as well as The Pied Piper — Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He is writing a new book, The Road To Baghdad — The Money Trail Behind The War In Iraq. He is a contribution editor for The American Conservative.