Large areas of the nation's capital were in ruins as violent protests continued for the third day against a bill that would revive the military draft, but only for neoconservatives.

The bill, officially called the Bellicose Resources Deployment Act but informally known as the Roast Chickenhawk Initiative, would supplement the nation's dwindling supplies of mindless belligerence by drawing on inexhaustible deposits found in seething think tanks, frothing newspaper columns, fulminating talk-radio programs, frenzied Sunday morning television and publications owned by Australians. It would then be shipped to the Middle East, where it is urgently needed.

The bill, explicitly requiring people who have never been in combat to serve in the wars they start, would affect thousands of neoconservatives in Washington and New York. It was strongly opposed by the Bush Administration on the grounds that it would leave most of the Administration's upper-level positions vacant, including the presidency and vice-presidency, but it was left unattended on President Bush's desk and he inadvertently signed it after deciding it looked too long and too hard to read first.

As the riots surged through Washington, 1,427 rioters were arrested by District police, all of them from poorer neighborhoods in the city and backwoods areas of nearby states like Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. The detained rioters said in their statements to the police that they had been recruited by roving committees of neoconservatives. They were promised up to $3 an hour for the rioting, to be paid out by Halliburton and other private contractors that have been awarded lucrative deals for providing mayhem logistics and infrastructure, with a secret Defense Department fund believed to be compensating the companies as much as $485 for each brick thrown and $17,000 for each Molotov cocktail. The neocons assured the hired rioters that they would be only too happy to join the rioting themselves, but they had "other priorities." Instead, they have volunteered to map rioting strategy and shout encouragement in the general direction of the rioters from their tables at their favorite expensive Washington-area restaurants, such as Forward Position in Chevy Chase, Foxhole in Bethesda and Sortie in Georgetown.

David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who has claimed credit for coining the phrase "Axis of Evil," and Richard Perle, the Pentagon consultant who is believed to be the only person ever diagnosed with a permanent case of road rage, said bitterly that the new draft law, by requiring them to serve in the military, would disrupt their efforts to rapidly expand US armed forces to the size needed to carry out the ambitious plans they have laid out in the book they recently published, which include the invasion and occupation of most of the countries on the planet and conceivably a few other planets as well. Frum and Perle insisted that they had no qualms about personally participating in the riots against the "unjust and discriminatory" new law, but unfortunately they were too busy writing a sequel to their book, An End to Evil, which is to be called An End to Whatever Comes After Evil.

Other prominent neoconservatives also assured reporters that they fully supported the riots even though they unavoidably had to miss them. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol was committed to a séance at which he would once again attempt to commune with the late Professor Leo Strauss, though he keeps getting put through to Michael Savage instead. Rush Limbaugh said that even with the help of heavy medication, rioting in the streets of Washington would be, for a man in his bloated condition, worse than a Skull and Bones initiation. Vice President Dick Cheney was said to be out duck hunting or just out ducking, it wasn't quite clear. Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith were busy planning second-term Bush Administration postwar occupation regimes for Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Vermont. Columnist Christopher Hitchens was celebrating, or at least drinking, after being honored with the Annual Gradual Conversion Blazer bestowed by the Association of Country Club Republicans. New York Times columnist David Brooks was on a whirlwind tour of Southampton, Bedford, Greenwich, Malibu, Grosse Point, Winnetka and other "typical American small towns" doing research for his new book, American Peachy Keen Paradise: Why All Is for the Best in the Best of All Possible Suburban Utopias Unless Of Course You're Not Rich. Francis Fukuyama was also working on a new book, a sequel to his controversial 1990s work The End of History, in which he had predicted that the fall of the Berlin wall had put an end to meaningful historical developments. His new book, The End of History--This Time I Really Mean It, will argue that there can be no more meaningful historical developments now that Martha Stewart has fallen. As for President Bush, he too had to excuse himself from the riots, since he had to get through the daily summary of the Book of Revelation provided by his staff while wearing a flight suit just in case the Rapture took place while he was reading about it.

Meanwhile, it was announced that authority for the continuing neoconservative riots is to be turned over to an interim angry mob composed of low-level staffers at the Heritage Foundation, the Project for the New American Century, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News by an August 31 deadline.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.