PRESIDENT BUSH: Alright! Alright! Alright! Karl Rove. You are the man. Arnold Baby in California. You are a GENIUS! I haven't had so much fun since I went AWOL from the Guard. And BELIEVE me, that was a lot of fun.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Karl, you know what a great kidder I am. But I could never have dreamed up this one. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Governor of California.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Old Arnold. He's a one-man weapon of mass destruction. He reminds me of Saddam before he got fancy and went with the Euro. God, I miss that guy.

KARL ROVE: Thank you, gentlemen. It was nothing, really. I realized long ago there was just one guy to get Gray Davis out of there. We couldn't run Arnold in the general election. That would mean debates and a long campaign and a lot of media scrutiny. To elect a specimen like Arnold, who is basically a circus strong man, you need, well, a circus.

PRESIDENT BUSH: You know, sometimes I get really moved by the opportunities we all have in this country. Where else but in America could the simple son of a God-fearing, down-to-earth Nazi storm trooper become governor of our nation's largest state?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yes, it really is quite something, George. Where else could an overseas colony like Iraq become such a juicy business opportunity for a humble mom-and-pop like Halliburton?

PRESIDENT BUSH: It's a wonder how God works. Here we let Kenny-boy at Enron shut off the gas and take all that money out of California and now the Democrats are taking the heat and we're going to get the governorship back. Gentlemen, at a moment like this, I think we should all get to our knees and thank the Lord.

KARL ROVE: Well, wait just one minute, George. Arnold hasn't won yet. He's a real piece of work. Knows absolutely nothing about government or the debt or the Enron scam. I've got him programmed to say a couple of sentences. You know how that goes, George. But if he gets off script, we're cooked. That's why we needed this special election. Kindof like Florida on steroids. As is Arnold, of course.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Our records show many extra-marital affairs, and few bouts with, shall we say, some men's problems.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, he's married to a Kennedy, for Chrissakes. What do you expect?

KARL ROVE: Arnold makes Clinton look undersexed. It's partly the steroids, and partly his attempt to compensate for being, shall we say, undersized in certain areas. So I've warned him to keep his pants zipped, at least for these next few weeks.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: He better keep his shirt on too, Karl. Either that or get back in the weight room. Did you see that picture of him bare-chested in the Post? He looks more like Rodney Dangerfield than the Terminator.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Ooooh, how about Rodney for Lieutenant Governor. Is he a Republican?

KARL ROVE: Right, those are Arnold's three commandments: shirt on, pants and lips zipped. The voting machines are rigged, by the way, so his victory is assured. We just installed 10,000 of those touch-screen jobs in San Diego. The margin there should be sufficient.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Inquiring into Governor Schwarzenegger's sex life is an act of terrorism.

SECRETARY RIDGE: But he's already being attacked by our allies in the church. They say he's too moderate and that he's pro-choice and smokes marijuana.

KARL ROVE: He is, and he does---for now. But that's just how you have to be in California. We coordinated these right wing attacks to make Arnold look moderate and to gather sympathy for him. But once he takes power, that state won't know what hit it. And neither will Arnold.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Gotta love it. Compassionate conservatism, California style.

ALL: Loud, prolonged laughter.

KARL ROVE: There is a problem with his name, though. It pisses off black people twice. So from now on, we just call him Arnold, got it?

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Referring to Governor Arnold as a Schwarzenegger is an act of terrorism.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: We'll need to raise a little more money for his campaign. So I think we better go ahead and sell Yosemite.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: I thought we sold ALL the national parks, already. What's the damn hold-up?

KARL ROVE: Well, we were hamstrung with Christy Whitman hanging around. No more problem in that department. What a bitch.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, it'll be great to have Mike Leavitt on board at EPA. With him there and Norton at Interior we can dump the rest of the parks and net a coupla hundred mil for the campaign. Those damn Democrats had all that timber and drilling and stuff tied up for way too long.

SECRETARY RIDGE: Actually, sir, the national park system started with Ulysses S. Grant, who established Yellowstone. He and Theodore Roosevelt, who was responsible for many more national parks, were both Republicans. I'm not sure they would have endorsed our selling them in exchange for campaign contributions.

PRESIDENT BUSH: They're dead aren't they? We need the money. God wants those parks sold and He told me to do it right away.

KARL ROVE: We better slow that down until after Mike's confirmation hearings. His stint as Governor of Utah didn't sit real well with the enviros. Not that we really care.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Hell, you even got a rise out of Lieberman on that one. Started screaming about our environmental record. When a wimpy kosher lapdog like that starts yapping you know it's time to back off a little.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Fuck Joe Lieberman. What balls of his we could find we wrapped up in Iraq. He couldn't even deliver Florida to Gore. I sure hope Al From gets him nominated.

KARL ROVE: Christ will return soon, and what we do to the planet makes no difference in God's plan. But our polls on the ecology are in the toilet. So we continue to attack attack attack. But we do it out of the public eye.

SECRETARY RIDGE: The recent attack on the Ozone treaty on behalf of our friends who manufacture methyl bromide were not well received, sir.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Hell, I've been in those damn forests. Those big trees are weapons of mass destruction. If one of them falls on some campers, five or six people could be killed.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, but half of them would probably be hippies who were sitting in the tree trying to protect it.

ALL: Loud, prolonged laughter.

SECRETARY RIDGE: A much worse problem is that a lot of our troops in Iraq are extremely ill with some strange disease.  Many of them are dying, just as they did after your father's Gulf War. There's a strong belief it's due to radiation from the enriched uranium in the anti-tank shells. The childhood cancer rate over there is very very high and it doesn't look good for our troops. You know, half the soldiers who served in the first Gulf War are disabled in one way or the other.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I know, that's why we had to cut veteran's benefits. We just can't afford it.

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Those damn slackers. They're just trying to get on welfare.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: What we really can't afford is any more exposure about the Saudis. I can't believe those idiots at the Senate let it slip into that report.

KARL ROVE: The Bush family has been doing business with the bin Laden family for a very long time. That they financed the 9/11 attacks with our own slush money is something that needs to be kept very very quiet.  

SECRETARY RIDGE: It's all over the internet. Soon it will be in some of the mainstream newspapers.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: We've got the Iraqi oil now, that's all that counts. Lets take out some more of those damn reporters. Enough is enough.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Linking the Bush family to the Saudi money that paid for the September 11 attacks is an act of terrorism.

KARL ROVE: Putting away California will just about do it for this country. We've got Jeb in Florida. Goodhair in Texas. Pataki in New York.

PRESIDENT BUSH: George Pataki is a damn wimp. Can't we do any better?

KARL ROVE: Wait til Hillary runs. We'll do to New York what we're doing to California.  And we'll blame it on her.  

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: Damn, I love it! It's just what we did to Chile and El Salvador and the Philippines and the Congo. You trash the damn economy through deregulation, like we did with the utilities in California. You blame it on the liberals. You find a front man like Arnold. You take over. Like falling off a damn log.

KARL ROVE: And there's always a liberal to help. John Bryson's been our boy in California. He was Mr. Green Energy when he was Jerry Brown's Public Utilities Commissioner. But now we give him a mil a year to run Southern California Edison for us. He stopped those damn hippies from turning the state to solar power. Then he engineered the deregulation thing with Pete Wilson. We got him about $30 billion to pay off those nuke plants on the earthquake faults. And then Kenny-Boy and Jim Baker cut off the gas and took another $60 or $70 billion.

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: You bleed a hundred billion big ones out of any state, it's gonna drop dead. What's fun is blaming it on the Democrats.

KARL ROVE: Right. Gray Davis kissed Bryson's butt and took the whole load for the dereg mess like we blamed Allende for the one in Chile. So now it's….POOF! …goodbye Gray, hello Arnold. Piece of cake.

SECRETARY RIDGE: But sir, these things can backfire. Look what happened in Colombia. And Iran. And what if the fundamentalists sweep back into Iraq?

KARL ROVE: This is America. A few arrests. A few assassinations. A few terrorist attacks. A few rigged voting machines. The whole place is finished.

ATTORNEY-GENERAL ASHCROFT: Americans who espouse democracy are known terrorists.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Oooooh, this is so much fun. Afghanistan. Iraq. And now California. It's a trifecta, just like September 11. What's next?

Copyright c 2003 by Lee Waters All Rights Reserved

ARMAGEDDON IS OVERDUE:  LEAKED WHITE HOUSE TRANSCRIPTS, 2002-3, by Lee Waters, will be available from www.freepress.org in September.