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The Year No One Can Remember

2009 will be remembered as the year no one can remember. Faced with the collapse of capitalism and multiple catastrophes triggered by global warming, President-elect Barack Obama called off the year after nine months of unremittingly bad news. Here is a month-by-month breakdown of the breakdown.

JANUARY – The year began inauspiciously enough when at Barack Obama’s January 20th inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts misidentified the President-elect as Osama Bin-Laden. Apparently not catching the chief justice’s “mistake”, Obama Hussein swore in under the name of Osama, technically making the latter president of the United States. It is not known if Roberts’ error was a slip of the tongue or a premeditated plot to elevate the Al Qaeda leader to the most powerful position on the planet.

Whether or not Bin Laden will continue as U.S. president will be decided by the Supreme Court with Roberts recusing himself because of his role in the scandal which insures that the panel will be deadlocked four to four for the foreseeable future.

In other news, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC announced that they are changing formats to a 24-hour fake news cycle.

FEBRUARY – With no decision forthcoming from the deadlocked Supreme Court, Bin Laden continues as U.S. president and Obama Hussein as president-elect. The confusion has detonated an unlikely string of events in the Middle East. On Groundhog’s Day, a national holiday in Iran, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad let fly with a shoe-shaped missile that dropped thousands of shoe-lets on Israel to protest the continuing bombing of Gaza now in its third month. The shoe-lets bopped several residents on the noggin, slightly injuring two Jews and an Israeli Arab in addition to rendering a hapless Bedouin camel unconscious. Israel launched a rain of nuclear missiles in retaliation killing and maiming a third of the Iranian people and eliminating that ancient nation’s non-existent nuclear capability.

In Iraq, the Baghdad shoe coup unleashed by militants affiliated with Muqtada al-Sadr so seriously contused Washington puppet Nuri al-Maliki after he was creamed by a pair of ten-pound combat boot that he had to be flown to Walter Reed Shoe Hospital for repairs. Hero reporter and shoe-flinger Muntadhar al-Zaidi has been chosen to replace the fallen quisling.

In other shoe news, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her first world tour of the first world, has been pelted by shoes in 12 countries, many of them in the latest designer models for which she thanked her would-be assassins.

On the economic front, the international shoe deluge has been the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal forecast with shoe stores staying open 25-7 to meet the demand for the missiles.

MARCH – The continuing confusion over who exactly is the U.S. president has impacted the American war machine in Afghanistan where 30,000 U.S. boots on the ground and another 30,000 being forwarded to that devastated landscape are now officially under Al Qaeda-Taliban command.

Meanwhile on the homefront, the plummeting economy has now reached the disastrous proportions of the Great Depression – of 1907 – when world commodity prices dropped into negative numbers but there was no cash to buy them. Among those most affected is the White House where all staff has been laid off. First Lady-elect Michelle Obama confessed to People Magazine that she is now doing White House floors – the first girls-elect will work off their allowances, reduced by half due to the calamitous economic situation, by cleaning the toilets. As usual, steamed Michelle, Barack Hussein refuses to take out the garbage.

Also in the financial toilet: the publishing industry. In a reflection of popular discontent at the collapse of capitalism, Karl Marx’s “Das Capital” hit number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The bad news is that Marx’s bestseller only sold three copies. The New York Times itself has gone belly-up causing older U.S. radicals who could no longer get their blood boiling without the daily lies served up by the former newspaper of record to lapse into life-threatening comas.

The downfall of the publishing industry also affected the author of Blindman’s Buff whose latest opus “El Monstruo – True Tales of Dread & Redemption in Mexico City” has been shredded and buried in a West African landfill.

APRIL – In a ploy to distinguish himself from President Osama Bin Laden, Obama Hussein has taken to wearing a yarmulke to express his solidarity with the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahoo now in its fifth month of bombing Gaza where over 4,000,000 Hamas-related Palestinians have been killed or wounded, double the population of that seaside strip and ten times the number of previously recorded Hamas supporters. “Hamas must stop its naked aggression against Tel Aviv,” the yarmulke-wearing president warned.

International tensions were also ratcheted up by the April Fool’s Day invasion of Atlanta, Georgia by Georgian strongman Mikhail Saakoshitli, claiming copywrite infringement. “We had the name first,” Sacoshitli told the former New York Times. The former Soviet Union came to the defense of that former southern state made famous by former ax-wielding governor Lester Maddox by launching a massive Piroshki attack on Tbilisi.

Meanwhile, a crack team of Yeshiva Talmudic scholars broke into Bernie Madof’s Upper East Side bunker and whacked the deposed Ponzi schemer in retaliation for putting their university out of its misery.

On the economic side, Goodwill Stores announced that it is taking over the shuttered factories of the Big Three automakers and converting them into thrift stores.

MAY – New York City police closed down Wall Street to pedestrian traffic after several Japanese tourist groups were crushed flat by plunging stockbrokers. Mobs of hungry homeless citizens sacked Sothby’s, carrying off the hors d’oeuvres and many priceless paintings of Andy Warhol Campbell Soup cans.

The deflationary spiral was accentuated when millions of lost balloons gathered over the North American landmass and plummeted to earth, further paralyzing traffic on major U.S. Interstates where over a million motorists now living in their cars after being evicted from their homes, have been parked in coast-to-coast gridlock for months.

JUNE – In news from our Latin neighbors, Felipe Calderon (“Fecal”), the fraudulently elected president of Mexico, has died in an alleged tricycle accident and is being replaced by a coalition of five drug cartels.

In another Latin development, Hugo Chavez was elected president for life of Venezuela but choked to death on a CIA-planted banana the next day during a victory party at Miraflores Palace while cursing the Yanquis.

As for the Yanquis, the Bronx Bombers announced the signing of Lebron James to an unprecedented billion dollar ten-year contract despite the penury of the nation. “We know Lebron plays basketball” conceded GM Brian Cashman, “but we really liked his exorbitant salary demands.”

Finally, final arguments were heard by the deadlocked Supreme Court in the Obama-Osama flap with no resolution of this existential crisis in sight.

JULY – Dog food has become so expensive and money so worthless that millions of Americans are broiling their pets. Packs of feral French poodles now rule New York’s Park Avenue.

Heeding his economic advisers whose worthless advice bankrupted the U.S. in the first place, The yarmulke-wearing President-elect has ordered the printing of a trillion dollars worth of worthless money. Desperate for a fix, the nation’s chronic shopping addicts are now hauling their worthless dollars to Wal Mart stores in wheelbarrows. A riot at the Mall of America in Minneapolis killed 36 when the doors opened at Wal Mart for the chain’s weekly wheelbarrow sale.

Meanwhile the price of gasoline which was down to two cents Americano in June suddenly skyrocketed to $10 a gallon. Collusion by the Saudi government and Greenpeace is suspected.

AUGUST – Record-breaking flooding on the River Denial has so swelled the world’s oceans that waves are lapping at the upper floors of the world’s tallest skyscraper in downtown Dubai. In other news of global warming, more than a million penguins turned out for the Million Penguin March On Washington.

President-elect Obama Hussein’s unresolved tenancy of the Oval Office was further jolted by news that ex-prexy George Bush, bored with sawing logs on his ranch retreat, has risen in Texas. Under rebel commander David Betrayus, Waco, Dallas, and Larry McMurtry’s Book City have fallen to the insurgents.

SEPTEMBER – With the Bushite army advancing on Washington, unemployment at 150% (many people lost two jobs), global warming turning Mother Earth into one big cuchifrito, and the Supreme Court still dead- locked over whether Osama or Obama is the legitimate U.S. president, the yarmulke-wearing President-elect opted to call off the rest of 2009 and fled to his home state of Hawaii which no one has been able to locate for months.

JOHN ROSS’s crystal ball was blown up by suspected Mossad agents on New Year’s Eve. If you have further information write johnross@igc.org or consult www.johnross-rebeljournalist.com.