Fright House

British Premier Tony Blair has apparently been called to the White House to perform an emergency exorcism on President George W Bush who, his aides feared, had been possessed by the spirit of Richard M Nixon. According to reports in the highly respected Weekly World Shopper (available at all good supermarkets), Mr Blair was flown from Heathrow to Washington Dulles Airport aboard Air Force One, following a frantic midnight phone call from Secretary of State Colin Powell. “The President was out of control! When he wasn’t ranting and raving and calling everyone ‘treacherous cocksuckers’, he was locking himself away in the Oval Office for hours on end, recording his paranoid fears onto a reel-to-reel tape machine and drinking whisky by the bottle,” confides an unnamed source. “Tony Blair was the holiest person we knew – after the President himself, of course!” At the White House, Mr Blair immediately donned dog collar and rosary beads to embark upon a gruelling twelve hour ceremony of exorcism. Although the President was firmly tied to a chair for the entire duration, he still tried to deter the British Premier, spitting at him and calling him a ‘sanctimonious asshole’. “It was no worse than facing the Labour Party conference,” Blair is reported to have later quipped.

After hours of saying prayers and sprinkling Bush with Holy Evian water (an aide claimed that the Premier had blessed the plastic bottle himself, during the flight from London), the evil spirit was finally cast out when an exasperated Blair hit the President over the head with a leather bound King James V Bible. “The President looked stunned for a minute, then seemed to break wind from both ends as the foul spirit of Nixon exited his body,” discloses the anonymous source. “The maniacal gleam went out of his eyes, to be replaced by that familiar vacant, startled rabbit, stare. We knew then that we had our Dubya back!” Aides believe that the evil spirit took possession of Bush after an Oval Office sceance, during which the President and top cabinet members had attempted to summon the ghosts of past Republican presidents to advise them on their election strategy. “Who better to give advice than a previous two-term Republican?” opines the unnamed source. “Unfortunately, Reagan proved even more even more difficult to communicate with dead than he was alive. Spookily, Gerald Ford tried to come through on the Ouija board, even though he isn’t officially dead! Finally, Tricky Dicky himself appeared!”

At first, contacting the spirit of Richard Nixon for advice seemed a good idea – a two term President who had been instrumental in extricating the US from an unpopular foreign war, and the master of dirty tricks against political opponents. However, senior political colleagues of President Bush soon suspected that something was very amiss with the Commander in Chief. Shortly after the seance Bush started suffering paranoid delusions, becoming convinced that even his closest political allies were conspiring against him. “It was ridiculous, he actually believed that Colin Powell was pursuing his own diplomatic agenda at the State Department, so as to discredit him,” says the anonymous source. “Even more bizarrely, he accused Donald Rumsfield of concealing vital information about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners and of lying to him about how well the occupation of Iraq was going! It got to the stage that he was beginning to suspect that his presidency was being manipulated by Dick Cheney for the benefit of huge multinational corporations!”

An increasingly desperate Bush ordered the FBI and CIA to carry out covert surveillance on cabinet members, authorising secret bugs and cameras to be put into their rooms, spending hours scrutinising the tapes. “We really knew something was wrong when he started talking about pulling out of Iraq and making peace overtures to Iran! Jesus, he even started saying that the US should accept that it was part of a multi-polar world and couldn’t act unilaterally,” reveals the source, disgustedly. “There was no doubt – that was the God damned Nixon Doctrine speaking!” Bush’s political opponents also fell victim to the malignant spirit, with orders being given for the FBI to break into the home of Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry and plant evidence which could discredit him. “He wanted drugs and kiddie porn concealed in Kerry’s house – the plan was to tip the local police off and have them ‘discover’ it,” says the source. “He also wanted to fake pictures of John Edwards having sex with Michael Moore! It was all pretty wild stuff, and we did actually consider going with it for a while, but thought we’d never get away with it!”

Although both the White House and Downing Street have dismissed the story as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘tabloid nonsense’, Deke Spiggot, proprietor and editor and of the Weekly World Shopper stands by his sources , describing them as ‘impeccable’. “This story is no more ludicrous than the President’s claims that a world-wide terrorist conspiracy to destroy the United States is being masterminded by a man on a dialysis machine hiding in some caves in Afghanistan,” he declares. “My sources are at least as credible as the one’s that told Prime Minister Blair Iraq was chock full of WMD.” The Shopper is no stranger to political controversy. Earlier this year it reported that Vice President Dick Cheney had died of a heart attack whilst masturbating, only to have been revived as a zombie in a voodoo ceremony presided over by High Priest Colin Powell and High Priestess Condoleeza Rice. The story was described as ‘highly offensive racist stereotyping’ by a White House spokesperson. Nevertheless, Spiggot has vowed that his newspaper will continue its fearless crusade for truth, promising devastating revelations about John Kerry. “He isn’t a real man at all – the Democrats have stitched him together from bits of previous Presidents,” he claims. “A bit of Kennedy’s brain they managed to save was transplanted into his skull, along with Jimmy Carter’s teeth. That supposed heart operation Clinton had? Nothing of the sort – he was actually donating part of his whang to Kerry so as to increase his appeal to the lady voters! Trust me, it’s all true!”