THE RAPTURE PRESIDENT I asked David Shaw, media critic for ...

PRESIDENT I asked David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, if he knew of any reporter who had asked the president about that rectangular thing under the back of his jacket during the first debate. Shaw said he didn't know of any.

Then, at a presidential press conference, Mark Slackman asked: "Sir, we still haven't heard a plausible explanation for the bulge under your suit in the first debate. Sir, were you being prompted by a hidden transmitter?"

Slackman is, of course, a reporter in the comic strip Doonesbury.

Bush gave his answer the next day, on ABC's Good Morning America. "I don't know what that is," he said. "I mean, it is-I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Yeah, fucking right. And Saddam Hussein married Osama bin Laden in Massachusetts and they adopted a Chinese baby.

Bush wasn't being prompted by his senior adviser, Karen Hughes, who's advised him not to refer to terrorists as "folks." He was being prompted by God Him-or-Herself. You know, God, the one who sent Bush on this mission. God, the one who Jerry Falwell says is pro-war. God, the one who told Pat Robertson that Bush would be reelected, and then Robertson went ahead and defied God's will by revealing that Bush wasn't concerned about American casualties in Iraq.

Bush once proclaimed, "God is not neutral," which is the antithesis of my own spiritual path, my own peculiar relationship with the universe-which says that God is totally neutral.

Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, believes that the "God supports Bush" theme holds great currency among Bush's base because Bush wants it to. "It is a belief the president encouraged, and that Karl Rove has encouraged," says Lynn. "It is, I think, extremely dangerous for people to believe that God is a Republican or a Democrat or a Naderite or even a libertarian."

I'm writing this five days before the election. I predict that either there will be a relatively landslide victory for Kerry, indicating that the polls were skewed-bypassing cellphones, Vote-or-Die campaigns and disillusioned Christians-or the results will be so close that 50,000 Democratic lawyers will end up battling back and forth in the courts with 50,000 Republican lawyers-dragging out, appealing again and again, stalling around-for, oh, say, at least four years, until finally John Edwards, his pompadour prematurely gray, argues the case unsuccessfully before the U.S. Supreme Court. Which by then will be packed with Bush appointees.

Is this how the world ends-with neither bang nor whimper, but with a bloodless bi-partisan coup?

Paul Krassner's latest CD is The Zen Bastard Rides Again.