Dirty Limericks about George Bush

One of the most popular traditions here at the Old Yorker is our Friday afternoon staff lunch when everyone from the most junior intern to the most venerable senior editor gathers around the long table in the conference room for a free-wheeling exchange of ideas over sandwiches and pop. At a recent Friday lunch, for instance, the topics ranged from how hard it is to find a decent internship to how much regret one should feel about not having done more with one’s life.

Last Friday’s lunch was a first in that the conversation was dominated by an outsider, a mentally unstable woman who presented herself at our offices and demanded to speak with someone about our relentless campaign to drive President Bush from office using obscene limericks. After being directed to the conference room, the woman burst in and proceeded to excoriate all present for the Old Yorker’s dirty limericks about George Bush.

“I love the Old Yorker,” she began. “But I can’t stand what you’re doing to the president. It’s disrespectful.”

The explanation we gave to her before escorting her to the door is worth repeating here. For the record, then, we do not hate George Bush. We respect the office that he holds and we admire him personally for his triumph over alcoholism and his many other accomplishments. We don’t believe that President Bush is unintelligent and we know that we would find him charming if we met him.

And, as people of faith ourselves, we share the president’s religious views and are prayerfully grateful to him for making his beliefs such a significant part of his public life.

In short, we think George Bush is great. We just don’t want him to be president anymore and, to that end, we are publishing scurrilous limericks about him with the promise to stop if he resigns the presidency.

Here is this week’s limerick:

Bush had a gay lover called Betzel
Who hailed from the village of Wetzel.
He did a lewd dance
And pulled down his pants
And said, “Hey, Prez, come choke on my pretzel!”

Dirty Limericks about George Bush

We live, it is often said, in a Golden Age of political satire. Our modern day Swifts: our Leno, our Colbert, our Gallagher, have unprecedented standing in the contemporary marketplace of ideas. And yet, despite their supposed influence, the net effect of their efforts is zero. After years of ridicule, George Bush remains in office, more powerful than ever and less and less interested in the “Tonight Show” with each passing hour.

As regular readers of the Old Yorker know, we have been following Lenin’s famous dictum to “go another way” and have been publishing naughty limericks about the president with the express goal of forcing George Bush to cry “no mas” and resign his office, leaving the presidency in the hands of Dick Cheney, a man whose last name is much harder to rhyme with than “Bush.”

Here then, the next limerick in our arsenal. This one appears to allude to the president’s time at Yale University, where he was considered something of a “card.”

A sexy young prexy from Yale
Was hung, it was said, like a whale.
But oft he would wish,
he weren’t limp as a fish,
for what was the point being male?