Happy Birthday, Mr. President:
Oh, the Rude Pundit's been a-rackin' his brain all week about what to get George W. Bush on the occasion of today, his 60th birthday. 'Cause what do you get the man who has everything? No, no, really, seriously, the man has everything. One can be sure he has an electric razor or a snazzy tie collection. And you can't buy him a bottle of wine or whiskey (well, you could, but you'd have to give it to him on the sly, wink, wink). And there's so many things the Rude Pundit couldn't afford. C'mon, you think we mere mortals could get him the kind of watch he's used to, a Bulgari or Ebel? Perhaps a nice Fossil, but, no, nothing more. We're just gonna have to think outside the box, as it were.

The Rude Pundit thinks we should all chip in and get George W. Bush a corpse for the start of his seventh decade despoiling the Earth. But which one, which one? 'Cause there's just so fuckin' many to choose from.

Howzabout the corpse of Ken Lay? Yeah, he can prop that stony cold fucker up in a corner of the Oval Office, embalmed there in its final death grimace, that strange mixture of pain, regret, and jubilation that Lay must have felt as he sensed his vile heart was finally imploding, turning on itself and making him feel as if his entire chest was going to rip out of his body, as he suffocated on his constricted organs and viscera. What a half-smirk Kenny-Boy must have had as he realized he was not only going to cheat the prosecutor, but he also couldn't be accused of taking the coward's way out and offing himself (or at least not offing himself in an obvious way like takin' a header off Enron's former headquarters). Somewhere in the senior citizen sodomy room of a federal prison, John Rigas is moaning in jealousy and anal tearing. Dennis Kozlowski is curled up in his bunk, cursing God for not taking him, too, as his cellmate tells him to shut the fuck up 'cause talkin' ain't good while you're givin' a blow job.

Yeah, Lay's corpse could be the ideal corpse for George W. Bush, all bundled up with a ribbon. After it begins to rot, Bush could stuff it full of campaign contributions, all of which turned out to be worthless to Lay, with no pardon possible. Presidents, after all, cost much, much more than governors. And the corpse could serve as a reminder for Bush that old money provides so much more body armor against scandal than new money.

No, no, Ken Lay's skinny corpse doesn't seem quite vivid enough for George W. Bush's 60th birthday. Perhaps for a 59th or 61st. But this one oughta be really special. The Rude Pundit's got it. Let's give the President the corpse of Abeer Qasim Hamza, the 15 - maybe 16 - maybe older - but no doubt young woman who was stalked, raped, and killed by a group of American soldiers, along with her parents and 7-year old sister. Sure, it'll be hard to give the entire body, what with Abeer having been shot over and over in the head after at least three soldiers gang-raped her. And who knows how much skin is left, since they used flammable chemicals to burn her body.

What could be a more perfect gift than the nearly headless, fleshless charred corpse of a young Iraqi woman? After all, the most poignant of the savageries of Saddam Hussein's reign in Iraq, the one repeated ad nauseam starting in 2003 (with nary a mention before), was the rape room, where the women of Iraq had to fear being kidnapped and taken to, where they were raped and tortured, with videotapes of the acts being used as a way to destroy their families, who were "dishonored" by the rape (one of the more charmingly culturally-repellent aspects of many Muslim nations). And now the women of Iraq no longer have to fear rape rooms. They get to fear predatory groups of American soldiers plotting to fuck and murder women, kill their families, and desecrate their corpses. The more things change, you know...

Sure, there's tons, thousands, tens of thousands, of other corpses that could be gifts to the President - American soldiers, cancer-ridden 9/11 rescuers, so, so many others. But maybe giving the President a gift-corpse would be wrong - it'd just be re-gifting because didn't he give all those corpses to us? How could we be so ungrateful.