Mr and Mrs Elmer J Fudd

Dubya is nothing more than the son of a petty crook from Texas. He has no real friends and nobody sane in Washington wants to be seen with him in the halls of government past chow time. There is something oily and queasy about the guy, they often say - a sense of something mutated upon itself, like the creature from the Kurt Russell remake of "The Thing."

Karl Rove and Karen Hughes are certainly not among the saner personnel on the preznut's staff. GOP political strategists are a breed like NASCAR pit crews or rodeo clowns, pure adrenaline and not much else beyond the hypothalmus gland. About the only time they really seem interested in normal life processes is when they see the cars going around the track or hear about a good party with free liquor. Let's just sum it up like this: the description on the book sleeve is a masterpiece, but the guts of the story is a snoozer.

So tonite I am here to tell you that desperation is steaming from Air Force One. Rove and Hughes, landing in their Kerry-wear for the last ditch march to oblivion, can feel the sea change in the air - which should be more of a tsunami if the exit polls on early voting hold their salt.

While Rove may have bubbled up from Hell to destroy the face of the Earth, he is not a capable strategist or even a remotely clueless polling analyst. He's as dumb as a bag of rocks in both departments. Rove is all about dirty tricks and got his degree from the Lee Atwater School of Religious Malignity at Liberty University, run and operated by the very blimpish Jerry Fallwell. The message derangement division comes from Hughes herself, who can be seen mouthing the words of the preznut's speeches as he gives them - leaving one to wonder if she was the voice piped into the preznut's ear during the first debate.

Tucker Carlson, the bow-tied conservative Illuminati of CNN's Crossfire, once said of her: "I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."

So there you have it. After his conciliatory call to Big John after November 2nd, Karl Rove, who is beginning to look more and more like the pudgy Philip Seymour Hoffman character from Boogie Nights, will plant a man-kiss on Dubya and tell the preznut he loves him. The look on Dubya's expression will be a confused mixture of embarrassment and brazen fascination. Of course, Karen Hughes will be in the room - and she will remove the wig and wipe off her lipstick with a defiant grip of her sleeve, declaring himself as Jenna's long lost father.

Stranger things have happened. Where have you been the last four years?