My Citizens, Subjects and Readers: I believe I quote of the great Richard Milhauser Nixonio when I observe that a president must always be honest and the true. It serves not for him to conceal even the smallest matter in his past record, present transgressions, or future nefarious plots from himself nor his fair people. To do any less is to fail in that first and primary cause presidential: To be better loved than feared. Then feared.

As such, I now admit the following: I came into being a citizen, and then being your president, knowing not how this Fair and Just Government is structured, nor how it might function. And, just as the dog best takes the world in through the mouth and taste, and the gruntmonkey through the sight and the application to his or her miniscule and insufficient ganglia genitalia, then know that a squid best takes in the world via immersion and absorption. So, then, in my fifth—or fierce-some—month of emersion (exmersion?) in this Ovular Office, here is what I have thus-far absorbed viz. the Governance of this fair land of which I am El Presidento Supreme:

THE TRI-PARTITE FERAL GOVERNMENT, HER CHECKS AND THEIR BALANCES

Our great American Ship of State has three primary branches; these are the Niña, the Piñta and the Sañta Mãria. These three are all drawn together under the iron-clad rule of law of the Mayflower Compact—itself a sort of small jacht held aboard the iron-clad Merrimack Y. Monitor

The Niña is a frigate manned by pirate-pilgrims, set upon fleeing their old land and finding and taking a new land across which they might escape from stodgy, puritanical religious notions in order to birth a new freedom of stodgy, puritanical religious notions. In our governance, they are specifically charged with forming, maintaining, amending and ignoring our nation's many traditions, commandments, edicts, customs and habits. Their shoes are buckled, their swords are sharp, their hats are tri-corne and their turkey-lusts insatiable. The first Niñero was Cotton Mather, who famously uttered "We landed not upon Plymouth's Rock because Plymouth's Rock landed not upon us." It is thus unsurprising that the symbol of the Niña is the Rock.

The Piñta is a deceptively small sloop in which there contain multitudes. The sailors of this vessel are Ninja Indiana, the be-feathéd and stealthily murderous haschishin aboriginal to this land. Each ninjum is charged with executing a single custom, tradition, or edict of the Niña, and the two are locked in an endless combat, the ninja first coursing over the amber waves of grain, bison-mounted, bearing down upon the hapless Niñeros tossed up on a sea of troubles, and then the reversal, and the Niña's canons coming to bear, and scattering, the ninja and their bison to the edges of the Plains Great and Small. The executionary Piñta Ninja Indiana is represented by the sheets of the butcher's papers with which they wrap the dismembered corpses of their coup-counted kills. Historical curiosity: this paper is traditionally made from the wrappings of the corpses of Egyptian King Gods—which does go far to explain the sandy, Middle Eastern unrest towards our America Gloria today.

Finally, the Sañta Mãria is a sailing dinghy in which rides a single zombie—"rides", for it would be a great stretch of language indeed to claim he steers or pilots that craft in any way. This zombie holds the shears with which he measures out the length of each custom and determines its proper execution; as he bumps and bumbles up against the other ships and their occupants across the great and roilous fields of this land, he trims and clips as necessary, and then weaves these smatterings and ejecta into a great cloth, impervious to our Melting Pot's terrible heat, a mighty hair-shirt in which a whole nation can wrap itself and self-flagellate for the greater good of all. It should go without saying—but so little can!—that his heraldry is the Shears which he wields, and that his heart is a dead and putrifying thing, as dim as the last fading light of human soulscraft which enlivens his clouded, vulture eye.

In order to avoid the Nation from falling fully into the thrall of any of these three factional branches of shipsmanstate, the Framers of the Constituent Structure of that Mayflower Compact put into place a set of "Checkful Balances"—or interlinking system of measuring scales—which serve to maintain a snarl of duplicitous order and stagnating bureaucracy, as outlined in the diagram below.

(view full-sized diagram) 

HOW A BILL BECOMES JUDE LAW

It begins when a citizen or set of the citizens determine, by a process known only to themselves, that something is Rotten in the Ship of State. These concerned serfs then contact a Bill, who takes these matters weighty and true into consideration and, if he determines them of valid concerns, sojourns to the Niña, and presents himself before the pilgrim-pirates. These savage filibusteros test Bill's mettle through a variety of actions: the Hot Committee Action, the Hot Floor Action, the Committees of Conferences, the Conference of Committees, the ATM, the DeepDP, bukkakke-kimona and the gauntletish Masturbate-a-Thon. Should Bill pass these many tests, and receive the approval of a simple majority (i.e. 51%) of those pirates of democracy, he is then passed on to the Native-American ninja if the Piñta, who are then charged with using their dark, occi-oriental arts to remake this simple Bill into a numbered Jude Law, whose sole responsibility is to travel the highways, byways and parti-ways of this great land and set right what once went wrong, much as the Hannibal Lector, Dr. Samuel Beckett, and B.A. Brachiatus of the Quantum Leap of the A-Team in your popular mythology. But this Jude Law must be wary, for at any time the zombie, sailing lonely as a cloudy in his tiny, rudderless dinghy, might choose to devour him, and loose his now ambulatory—yet nonetheless handsome—corpse upon the lands to roam in its deathless, eternal purgatory of hungers profane.

To wit, please see the following illustrative diagram:

(view full-sized diagram) 

"What think you, the, Gee Double-Yew," I asked, with admittedly some of the excitements, having just explicated my understanding of our governance to my confidant, the Ex-President.

"Well, Squidgy, it's . . ."

"Are not my diagrams cunning?" I asked, pressing the plastic-printed transparencies again against the glass of his singular viewing window of my Cabinet.

George Double-Yew flinched away from the glass.

"They're . . . They're good. Well, the Jude Law one is a little . . . unsettling, but . . . you've . . . You've implemented this new system of yours?"

"New system? I apologize for the confusions, George Double-Yew. New system? Recognize you not that I have just explained the standing system of governance which I inherited?"

The Ex-President let out a great inpent breath, relaxing noticeably. He shook of his head, "Squidgy, this is . . . see . . . This is how you think the government runs?"

"Yes."

"Squidgy, we have a problem. Let me explain . . ."

to be continued . . .