George Bush is determined to stimulate the economy. The very tired economy really doesn’t think there’s much point. It has been heard pleading: “Can we please stop now? This isn’t working for me. And I don’t have the energy to fake it any more.” But the Bush administration’s economy-rape specialists aren’t listening. They are grimly determined to make the economy respond to stimulation.

We sent out a band of intrepid reporters to interview the economy, who, as you can imagine, is being held under very close guard in a secret and undisclosed location. That’s what the government — in all its various forms and shapes — currently does to you if you have been the victim of doomed attempts at involuntary stimulation. In fact, we were told off the record, Halliburton/KBR served as consultants to the President’s so called economic advisers in the case of the ravished ravaged economy.

One especially resourceful interviewer, who got close enough to the hapless economy, asked: “So why do you think putting $145 billion into the hands of consumers, so that they may go out and spend it, so that you may be stimulated, is such a bad idea?”.

And this is what the economy said in reply:

O, ye of little brain! (For some reason, the economy likes to talk like that.) The man on the street is not just a consumer. The man on the street has many men living inside of him. Roughly half of them are, in fact, women, but I digress. One of these inner people is a profligate consumer, sure. But the p. c.’s internal approval ratings are probably lower than even Bush’s. Wielding the most clout right now is the bill-payer-on-the-point-of- desperation. You give the man on the street a tax refund or whatever, put some money in his pocket, and you have to be pretty retarded to believe that he’s going out and spending that money. Apparently, Bush and his economic advisers are. Pretty retarded, I mean. That money’s going to the credit card companies, period. That’s good for the credit card companies, of course. So some good will certainly come of this. Certainly.

A parting note: there’s no doubt that the U.S. economy is resilient. It’s resilient enough to scare the effing pants off every major stock market around the world. Germany was scared to the tune of 7%. Paris, France showed its underpants to the tune of 5%. So did London. The Indian market seems to be afflicted with serial terror: it plunged more than 11% on Monday after dropping more than 7% on Monday. Hong Kong fell almost 14% over the two days, Japan more than 9%. Pretty impressive! Will this terror last? Will this terror grow? Will this terror spread? Stay tuned. In the meantime, don’t listen to anything emitted from the speaking orifice of a Bush-man.