In a move that seems likely to further alienate his conservative and evangelical base, President Bush has declared himself a “Marxist-Lemonist Alchemist Wizard.” The surprise move was, according to White House press spokesman Tony Snow, forced on the President by the fact that he has run out of his own bad ideas and is having to look elsewhere for some new ones, even if they aren’t exactly new and don’t make any sense.

“He realizes time is short and he’s going to have to scramble to come up with ideas as wrongheaded, delusional, self-contradictory and pernicious as the ideas he’s been basing his two terms in office on, and he stayed up all night working on this one,” Snow said.

The President also surprised many observers when he recently said that he rejected the “so-called scientific consensus” behind Copernicus’s theory that the earth moves around the sun and announced a federally funded research program that would attempt to prove that the sun moves across the sky above a flat earth, possibly pulled by winged horses or rolled along by gremlins. He added that he believes the moon is a democracy made of green cheese.

“You gonna try and tell me the sun isn’t moving around up there?” he asked, pointing upward toward the ceiling and chortling nervously while addressing a White House-sponsored science conference consisting of several hundred eminent apes who have signaled their disapproval of Darwin’s theory of evolution by openly and volubly preferring bananas to it when offered a choice.

Bush took the occasion to announce a couple of other science initiatives, one that would apply leeches to patients instead of stem-cell research as a way of treating certain illnesses and one that would ask a team of physicists to determine what kind of entity Dick Cheney is and what constitutional astral dimension he inhabits. Bush was clearly pleased when the simian audience, which included the Rev. Pat Robertson, screeched and gibbered its approval.

The President is said to be intensely interested in other bad ideas as well, including phlogiston, phrenology and metempsychosis, but he is holding off a public announcement that would make all of these official Administration policy until someone tells him how to pronounce them.