Dr. Werner von Hasenpfeffer of the Zurich Brain Laboratory suggested in a press release today that promiment members of the Bush Administration may have been affected by a brain ray of as-yet unknown origin:

Vat ve have here eez a prrroblem of ze highest order. Herr Michael Chertoff, ze head of ze Department of ze Homeland Security, insists zat he has seen ze headline "New Orleans dodged ze bullet" in ze papers on Tuesday morning ze siks of September. However, ve have not seen any newspapers vich bear zat headline. Zis same mental affliction has appeared in ozer members of ze administrrration. Rrrichard Meyers, chairman of ze Joint Chiefs of Schtaff, insisted zat he saw ze same headline. Ze Rrrepublican Rrrepresentative David Dreyer from ze California also said he saw ze same headline. Ich bin suschpetink zat ze same aliens who caused ze hurricane also targeted zese people mit a brrrain ray.

Even with the greatest minds of Zurich's Brain Laboratory working twenty-four hours a day, we may never know why key Republicans repeated the same line: that every newspaper headline said on Sunday, Sept. 6 that New Orleans "dodged the bullet." But why would key Republican officials do this? Of the hypotheses forwarded by SEDHE Washington Correspondent H. Simon Gregory, the most unlikely is that the "dodged the bullet" story was being disseminated to explain President George W. Bush's comments last week that no one could have anticipated a breach of the levy. Gregory explains:

Another theory, besides Dr. Hasenpfeffer's theory of the alien brain ray, could be that Chertoff and others were running damage control. Last week, George W. Bush said, "No one anticipated the breach of the levees." Now, either Bush's statement is patently false, or Bush was reacting to the headlines in all the major papers Sunday morning which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." The president, then, was merely suggesting that New Orleans was safe from the hurricane! No harm done! Of course he wasn't suggesting that no one anticipated a breach of the levees, because obviously lots of people did. What the president meant was that, after reading the headline in the paper which read, "New Orleans dodged the bullet," he figured New Orleans was safe! But of course this scenario, in which a highly organized Republican response is engineered and high-ranking officials are told what to say, and then the existence of an engineered response is revealed through several statements, all of which are exactly the same and are all wrong in exactly the same way, is improbable. Better stick with the brain ray.

SEDHE's crack research staff was unable to uncover a single instance of any newspaper that declared, "New Orleans dodged the bullet." They were, however, able to find that exact wording as the headline of a story on the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. That story is from Monday, Aug. 29. Note that WorldNetDaily contains banner advertisements for Jerry Falwell and a headline from today links to a website for the fair and balanced book The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values.

Calls to Dr. Von Hasenpfeffer's sprawling villa in the Bahamas were not immediately returned.