President Bush’s job approval rating has sunk to just under zero for the first time, according to new polls. Polling experts say that this is an all-time low, and that only certain toxic molds have come close to those numbers in the past. The unusual rating occurred when the President was given an enthusiastic endorsement by former FEMA director Michael Brown.

Earlier this week, Brown was standing on a corner not far from the White House, begging for spare change, when Bush, out riding his bike for the afternoon, ran into him. After puffing Secret Service agents assigned to follow the President on foot and extricate him from any quagmires he might steer himself into caught up with him and disentangled both men from the twisted bicycle spokes, Bush slipped a $100 bill into Brown’s paper cup, which prompted the disgraced ex-crony to say, “Bushie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.” A polltaker standing nearby overheard the favorable assessment, and since anything Brown positively asserts counts for double in the negative sense, and all other respondents had expressed their disapproval of the President’s job performance, this drove Bush’s approval rating just below the critical zero percent mark, which could be a tipping point for his presidency, some analysts believe.

But Bush’s numbers recovered somewhat a few hours later when Brown revealed he had changed his mind and now disapproved of the President’s performance. After getting home that night, he said, he discovered that the hundred had a portrait of Dick Cheney instead of Ben Franklin on it. Investigators believe that it was one of the new bills issued by Halliburton, which was recently given a contract by the White House to print its own money.

Brown’s sudden reversal lifted the President’s poll numbers back up to the more respectable one-tenth of one percent range but did little to stop the erosion of his crucial conservative base. Not only has he lost the support of Cheney, who is said to prefer his new chief of staff, Vlad the Impaler, as an instrument for carrying out his secret agenda, not only has he recently been abandoned by most neoconservatives, neoneanderthals and neobrachiopods, but he has finally lost the last-ditch support of his wife, Laura, his dog, Barney, his twins, Jenna and Barbara, and, according to at least one poll, himself. Called by a pollster at 8:45 PM, just before his bedtime, the President asked sleepily whether Zogby would do anything for attention-deficit disorder and whether it came in capsule or tablet form and then abruptly hung up when the phrase “job performance” came up.

The President’s stricken poll numbers led to renewed speculation among economists that it might be time to outsource the job to someplace where it might be performed more competently and for less money. In Poona, India, 22-year-old Bahjaree (“Cindy”) Prandra, a customer service representative for an American cellphone company, said that she would be happy to consider the position if it paid more than her current salary of $1.85 an hour, adding that the new requirement that the President be familiar with spoken English would not be a problem. She pointed out that she had studied English grammar for several years in school and, as a further qualification, she is already used to getting angry, demanding phone calls all day and telling people to please calm down, “So,” she said, “I’m sure I can handle the neocons.”