We are finally in the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency. I’m mostly certain that on January 20th, 2009, we’ll be listening to the inaugural speech of a new president while the camera plays over the scornful smiles of the outgoing president and vice-president.

I have a sentence for that speech, one that might wipe the smiles off those mis-proportioned faces: “We must stop dying as an empire and start rising as a nation.”

The next president is welcome to use those words free of charge, as long as it remembers where they came from, and as long as it means them when it says them. And if it wants to start slipping me some campaign funds for a felicitous phrase now and then, something to add to its speeches so it won’t look like a total idiot, it can get in touch with me through this newspaper.

I’m designating the new president an “it,” and not just because in this election year its gender is up in the air. Other things are up in the air, too, notably the glistening mile-by-half-mile UFO that hovered over Texas last week.

My first thought was that it was the Housing Bubble, paying one last visit to the Crawford Ranch before heading even further south to its base in Antarctica.

But eyewitnesses said it was a giant mother-ship, big enough to carry all of the presidential candidates, their advisors, their children (except in the case of Mitt Romney, who has his own mother-ship), and the entire election-year press-corps.

Giant UFOs are the sorts of things that transform “certain” to “mostly certain” in a journalist’s mind. I wish I was absolutely certain that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are human beings who place the well-being of this country foremost on their agendas. But with the Iraq War, the federal deficit and the Texas UFO in front of us, there’s a reasonable possibility that they’re really space aliens in ill-fitting human suits.

It could be that the mother-ship is here to deliver a new human suit to the Oval Office.

I realize this line of thought is disturbing, and I wouldn’t believe for a minute that space aliens are our rulers, except that Bush and Cheney keep insisting that water-boarding isn’t torture. The only possible explanation is that they’re both specimens of a water-breathing species. If you’re a space-fish, water-boarding isn’t going to bother you a bit, and it might be hard to empathize with the creatures it does bother.

And Jenna Bush’s rumored pregnancy that’s bouncing around the Internet with all those maybe/maybe-not photos? Nothing’s going to show much if what’s gestating in there is a few thousand guppies.

And have you noticed that when Bush looks straight into the camera, the eyes don’t focus? That’s because fish have eyes on the sides of their heads. Their brains can’t process binocular input, which is why they had to put the eyes so close together on the presidential human suit. When Bush turns and looks at you sideways, that’s when you really have to be careful. He’s paying attention.

Here’s what I’m hoping for: That next year’s inaugural address is really a farewell. A fish-alien in the guise of Ron Paul will announce the departure of all fish-aliens for their ocean-covered home world of Aldebaran XXII. They’ve given up the invasion of Earth as a bad idea, especially now that it’s clear that humans aren’t as grateful as they thought we’d be. But before they go, they’ll try to ensure that humankind stops polluting the oceans, breaches the dams that interfere with anadromous spawning, and adopts universal catch-and-release laws across the planet. (It turns out that fish like catch-and-release. It’s a game they play with humans. They just don’t like it when the humans cheat.)

If we don’t do these things, the space-fish will activate an orbiting satellite that will melt the Earth’s ice-caps within a century. Our coastal high-rises will start looking like the little castles in the bottoms of aquariums.

There are of course other possibilities. Some folks on the Internet right now are claiming that Bush and Cheney are humans after all, just exceptionally power-hungry ones who have no intention of leaving office. There’s something fishy about these guys, they say. They say our executive branch is about to activate martial-law under the guise of preventing an alien invasion, postpone elections indefinitely, and dismiss the U.S. Constitution as irrelevant to the struggle at hand.

But I can’t take these folks seriously. They’ve lost touch with reality. And frankly, the scenario they’re projecting is too depressing to contemplate.