[My Chain Gang, 2]

SHIMMY: Why do you want to work on my chain gang, Karl Rove?

KARL ROVE: My skills are an ideal match for this position. I directed sales and marketing operations within the highly successful Terror industry. I spearheaded successful product launches, resulting in added military expenditures of nearly $500 trillion in just five years.

SHIMMY: My chain gang must monitor dawn-to-dusk for bats, moths, bumblebees, camel crickets, cicadas, ladybugs, locusts, squirrels, ground beetles, houseflies, ants, and water bugs. And mice. Have you ever done this kind of work before?

KARL ROVE: I'd like to emphasize something, Shimmy. I directed and coordinated the successful launch of several key product lines -- yellowcake uranium, mobile germ factories, and aluminum tubes for centrifuge enrichment, to name three of the most successful -- in the competitive high-tech Terror industry, where quick movement from conceptual stages to market is essential.

SHIMMY: What if you escape from my chain gang and move to New York, where you become a prominent citizen and superintendent of a construction business? And then because of a letter from your brother, your girlfriend discovers you're a fugitive and blackmails you into marrying her?

KARL ROVE: I draw flowers from blood, and can simultaneously manage multiple projects under tight deadlines. I breeze through harrowing suburbs until my cheeks cave in.

SHIMMY: What's that noise inside the radiator?

KARL ROVE: It's pretty straightforward. We are surrounded in this country by the inscrutable, opaque clacking in the radiator. Abbadon and Asmodai squat on my bovine shoulders.

SHIMMY: I own two Tora Bora litter boxes. What happens if they're both not scooped every day and cleaned wholesale once per week?

KARL ROVE: As people do better, they start voting like they're afraid -- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

SHIMMY: Is there anything I haven't told you about my chain gang that you would like to know?

KARL ROVE: I sing like a locust and chew my matted hair. I am more precious than anything.