His head always took up the whole frame (AP)

I had the flu. Presidents get sick. I coughed, then coughed again, and whatever Ghostbusters-like gobbet ended up on the sheets of my Presidential bed was nothing to be proud of, I assure you. It’s either that or the fact that all this election excitement is getting to me. My old friend and lover backspace backspace backspace backspace backspace colleague Karl Rove is now a commentator at Fox News. Et tu, Karl-tay?

He used to joke about people like that. He called them “common taters.” Though now that I think of it, maybe he was just saying the world normal.

Associated Press

You know how I write songs? Well, I do! I used to write them all the time with my acoustic guitar. I wrote one called “Peaceful Easy Feeling” even before the Eagles did (a totally different song — in mine, I was talking about urination), and I wrote one called “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” right after I heard the Gordon Lightfoot song (that one was one hundred percent the same). Well, so now it’s Super Tuesday, and that means that while America’s getting its American ass bit by the voting bug, I’ll be rubbing lotion on the spot where the songwriting bug bit me. That’s right: I wrote a song about today. It goes like this:

Super Tuesday
Reds and blues day
Cast your ballots
Then make pallets
And lay down on the floor
Alongside a young whore
Explain to her the reason
We vote in such an early season

So, the Giants have won the pennant. Congratulations to them and their quarterback, Eli. I watch football with only passing interest, not because I am light in the loafers or even because I have loafers, but because at heart, deep down, of course, I am a baseball fan, a former owner — one who will swear under oath that he never knew anything about steroid use among players.

The sport of champions (AP)

But there was one thing about the f-ball (that’s what I call football) game that interested me. Do you know that when a team from the old AFC wins the Super Bowl, the stock market tends to go down? And when a team from the old NFL wins, the market tends to go up? The Giants are one of the oldest franchises of all, so the market is due to go way up. And when the market goes way up, Presidents tend to get re-elected. The Giants shocked the world, and I will shock the world, too. I’m coming back, America!

Rudy’s out. Edwards is out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here’s my policy: you can’t be president if you don’t have the stones. You know what I mean by that, right? Not the fancy little stones that I keep in a velvet pouch because I secretly believe that they have magical powers.

No: I mean cojones, which is Spanish for “Spanish balls,” which are the same as American balls except for the fact that they might get burned by taco meat instead of hamburger meat if you’re cooking nude.

Whew. Just woke up. So tired from last night: the speech, the autographs, the Jell-O shots. Ha ha. Just kidding about that last part. I am a recovering alcoholic and so would never do Jell-O shots, not even if, say, a beautiful young Georgetown co-ed happened to run into me right after the State of the Union and say a line that I have been dying to hear since I became President. “Hey,” she said. “What about OUR union?” Then she said something about entering chambers and I went weak in the knees, elbows, and ass. That’s just where I get weak.

Sorry. I have always said that the only way I’d ever do a blog is if it was completely honest — unlike, say, my rationale for going to war with Iraq. I didn’t go off with that co-ed. I went home with Laura and read a mystery in bed. The butler did it. I’m not kidding. The freakin’ butler actually freakin’ did it. Then I dreamed about the Jell-O shots that I didn’t do.

A big night for me, folks. The State of the Union. Tonight. Be there. I will be. And I’ll be taking aim at earmarks.

I hate earmarks. I want unmarked ears more than anything in the world. No more pork-barrel spending, either: it’s all chicken-barrel spending and fish-barrel spending and maybe a little bit of venison-barrel spending if you live in a place where there are lots of wild venisons. And hey, America, don’t worry about the economy so much. If you’re rich, you might fall down, but you’ll get back up. And if you’re not, well, we’re out of time. Drive safely. I’ll be here all year.

Oliver Stone says he wants to make a movie about me

In this picture I’m singing, not holding crack smoke in my lungs till I’m dizzy.

My heart goes out to Amy Winehouse, singer and drug abuser. I was once just like her. I sang and sang and sang. Heh heh. Inside joke. But let’s get serious for a minute, like Jermaine Jackson. (Just because I wasn’t a singer doesn’t mean I don’t know singers.)

Once upon a time, as I have discussed frankly, I used drugs. It started recreationally, and then I found I needed it to balance my soul, which was shrinking without Jesus, except I didn’t know it.

Bobby Fischer is dead. That makes me very sad.

This isn’t well-known, but I have a longstanding love affair with the game of chess. In fact, when I was governor of Texas, I once requested a match against a top Grandmaster. I can’t reveal the identity of the person, because it may embarrass him in his new job as Russian politician. Anyway, he came to town to play me. I was so excited. I read tons of books before and thought I had the perfect strategy worked out to beat him.