Rough draft of hastily canceled presidential address regarding the effort to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).
My fellow Americans,
Lots of people at home and abroad are increasingly skeptical about the existence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. Perhaps this is because, after three months of looking, we haven't found diddly.
However, I am urging you to be more patient with our search effort than we were with the United Nations' search effort.
While it's true that there's nobody left in Saddam Hussein's regime to ''delay and deceive'' us -- as they did to those pushovers from the U.N. -- the weapons hunt is still mighty challenging. Let me remind you for about the 27th time that Iraq is as big as California, and is mostly desert.
Deserts are vast arid flatlands made up predominantly of sand. Sand is loose granular matter that is produced by the disintegration of rock. Rock is a formation of stony minerals . . . well, you get the picture.
According to our most current intelligence estimates, the Iraqi desert is made up of ''jillions and kazillions'' of grains of sand. One particle of anthrax the size of a single grain could infect thousands of innocent people. Therefore, it is our intention to search Iraq one grain of sand at a time until we're absolutely sure that Saddam did not disguise any biological agent as desert cover.
I'd be laughing if I weren't banging my head on the table...
Anyhow, Carl Hiaasen has written a lot of books about corrupt operatives and small-time crooks in Florida (sound familiar?) so I'd say he knows whereof he speaks...