The ad was designed to criticize the Democrats’ plan for dealing with prescription drugs and calls them “bureaucrats.” Then, if the viewer watches very closely, something else happens--the word “rats,” a fragment of the word “bureaucrats,” pops up in one frame. It is in large white letters, larger than any other word in the commercial.

Bush, tired from his overnight stay at the Get-A-Little-By-The-Sea Rest Home, where he had been relating to really really real people, kissed a sobbing Widow Lotta Butt in a fond farewell, and with the propeller on his yarmulke spinning out of control, said today, “One frame out of 900 hardly in my judgment makes for a respiracery--I am not convinced this was conventional. You don’t need to play, you know, ‘cute’ politics….”

“This just didn’t pop up out of thin air,” said Doug Hattaway, a Gore spokesman, munching on a grilled cheese sandwich. “Some rat had to sit down at a computer and create this….”

“I do not endorse subliminabubble messages,” said Candidate Bush, forgetting for a time his really really real people talk. “Why would I do something like this when I want to be President in the worse way? I am the champagner who wants to bring murals back to the White House and the Oral Office,” he added as he read from the text handed to him by Alex Castellanos, who created the controversial piece.

Mr. Castellanos is an apprentice of the late Lee Atwater, who was responsible for the infamous Willy Horton ads in George H. W. Bush’s campaign against Michael Dukakis. “This ad was not planned,” said Mr. Castellanos, as he drew up intricate plans for a new production due out next week. “This all happened Willy-nilly.” A reliable source revealed that “the new ad is said to be about penitentiaries and the words ‘penal’ and ‘head’ are to be flashed subliminally.”

Bush has been plagued by a lagging campaign, with every morning bringing some new disaster for him to confront. “I am gettin’ dad-burned tard of this,” he said today, lapsing once again into his Ross Perot really real people talk. “I’ll be a jackass a humpin’ an elephant, ever’ time I turn upside down, something happenz…in my champagne.”

It is said that the Bush campaign is now two warring factions, one in Washington and one on the campaign trail. Neither can agree on decisions vital to the campaign. “If this little asshole doesn’t get on the ball,” said one RNC official in Washington today, ”we are going to lose this election--he failed in the debate-evasion maneuvers, his first attack ad has fizzled, and now that bitch, Diane Sawyer, has accused him of being dyslexic.”

Candidate Bush said after his interview on Miss Sawyer’s “Good Morning America,” Tuesday, and following her insinuations that he was dyslexic, “I am not diabetic. These needle marks are not from insulin shots. As soon as my new medical records are printed, I will make them availablebull.”

The Republican National Committee immediately raised a furor when Bush’s “availablebull” denial was flashed on viewers’ screens in closed caption and the word “bull” popped up in big white letters for one-thirtieth of a second in one frame. “This is a conspiracy to turn the voters against this well-spoken Yale-Harvard-6th grade graduate,” said Ari Fleischer, Bush campaign spokesman today. “I smell a rat.”

The candidate’s father, George H. W. Bush, said, as he emerged from the RNC headquarters at Kinko’s in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday evening, “I now have the newly newly retooled retooled medical records of the next President of the United States to back up his remarks and I think this should be a shot in the arm.”

Communications director of the Bush campaign, Karen Hughes, said today, from a plane in Orlando as she handed out cheese to members of the press corps, in an effort to be ‘cute,’ “we are definitely not trying to get the rat vote…the rat vote belongs to Pat Buchanan, who deserted this sinking ship and is now currently only polling one percent.” Pat/Bay Buchanan immediately challenged Ms. Hughes to a mud wrestling contest, saying that the Bush campaign was being “cheesy.” “This entire Presidential campaign comes down to who in America can build a better rat trap,” said Pat/Bay. “This campaign will be taking our message to the American people. Our sheets are packed and we are ready to go.”

Candidate Bush, his robe and sandals discarded for a moment, but still wearing his yarmulke with the wildly spinning propeller, donned hospital garb on Monday and made the rounds of a hospital in Orlando, Fla., with two cancer survivors and four doctors. “I am not a doctor, but I play one on your TV,” he told viewers as he gazed seriously into the cameras, trying not to smirk. Taking a stethoscope from around his neck and placing it in the crotch of one of the patients, he frantically tried to detect a heart beat. Declaring the amazed patient dead, he immediately yelled, “Nurse, call 611.” When the patient got up and disgustedly walked away, Bush’s campaign staff issued statements that their candidate was a “miracle worker.”

“This is yet another example of our candidate’s tireless efforts to bring some life into his campaign,” said Mr. Fleischer. After the incident, a disheveled Patient Holden MaGroin, hastily pulled up his pants and said, “I am both humiliated and embarrassed. Mr. Bush doesn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground.”

Undaunted, “Dr.” Bush continued on his rounds…this time to an OB-GYN Clinic where he donned rubber gloves and prepared to examine a female patient, Mrs. Hi Horse, a Republican committee-woman from that area who had volunteered to assist in the production of the GOP ad. Mrs. Horse says she is now solidly in the Gore column after “Dr.” Bush fumbled while trying to help her get her feet in the stirrups.… “He was so crude,” she said. “And then when he said he was going to saddle up, I knew it was time for me to yell ‘whoa….’”

Wednesday, Mr. Bush traveled to Monrovia, Washington, where he once again retooled his retooling by retooling once again. “I am going to introduce my really really new champagne theme,” he said, in a state park where he is promoting privatization and “preservation.” His sandals flapping as he donned his robe, he grabbed his imitation real leather Bible and rosary, adding a prayer shawl to his ensemble with the yarmulke and the ever-spinning propeller, and said, “At the Prevention in Transylvania, my theme was ‘Leave No Child Behind,’ and then I retooled my tool and it was ‘Real People for Real People,’ and now I have retooled the retooling--today it is “George W. Bush, An Era of Responsibility.”

When asked if changing his campaign themes so often could not signify a failure on his part to communicate with the people, George WhMMps replied, “That is the fault of those other assholes. I am not responsabubble.”