And the truly most peculiar part of the whole damn thing is this: that a pirated clip of it STILL isn’t up on YouTube. Now that’s not merely suspicious—it’s practically im-the-fuck-possible. Conspiracy nuts of the world take heed! The unspeakable probable truth has been spoken at last, and from the lips off a claymation spaniel.

Check it out:

It was Saturday night (and I was feeling alright) and I was barely watching SNL. Or Mad TV. (Whatever. Same difference.) I was also, as usual, musing on the complete horror that is everything George W. Bush. (I don’t have an Ipod. I must amuse myself somehow.) Suddenly, there it was—BAM! A total David Lynch fucking moment. And I was caught in it. And I haven’t been the same ever since. Nothing has…

Sandwiched in between other not too funny and already forgotten SNL shenanigans was the most unfunny and tragically unforgettable shenanigan in the history of shenanigans. It was animated. It was terrible. It gave me a three-day case of the twitching heebies. And it goes a little something like this:

We open upon a big clay field of tall clay grass. A gunshot rings out! (Bang!) A moment, then a dead clay duck falls from the sky. (Thud!) Suddenly, bounding through the tall clay grass, comes…a clay spaniel. A hunting dog! (How jolly!) He takes the murdered duck corpse up in his jaws, regards the camera with dead seriousness. He drops the dead duck, and speaks (he can talk; he’s clay…):

“…I am Dick Cheney’s dog…my master Richard Bruce Cheney is involved in a plot to take over the world involving nuclear missiles launched on American cities and blamed on terrorists…please, someone, he has to be stopped…”

Then the claymation dog gathered the kill back up in his little clay jaws and bounded back off into the happy clay grass to lay the carcass at the feet of his horrible clay master, Dick Cheney.

Then it was over. Just like that.

What. The holy. Bleeding. FUCK???

Was this a rerun? Was it NEW? Did it really even just happen? Or was it just some nightmareish hallucination? (It’s a possibility.) Did a goddamn clay-fucking-mation spaniel just hop onto SNL (or MAD TV! WHATEVER!) and lay my deepest and most paranoid paranoias bare in some capital B-izzarre and totally not funny (not. Funny. Not. Not. Not…) manner—-the unfunniest, not-even-trying-to-be-funny-ist manner possible? That damn talking dog was no wisecracking cartoon—-as far as I could tell (it was Saturday night, and I was feeling alright) there was not even a reach at humor—-not even the barest attempt to engage an actual chuckle. That dog was deadpan. He was in earnest. He. Wasn’t. Fucking. Funny.

Was this most misguided thing Mad TV (SNL!) has dome since everything (baring “Dick in a Box” and “Natalie Portman Raps”)? Or was this something darker…deeper…more truly awful? Was this weird animated skit intuiting something many of us are really secretly quite anxious about…that these Bushy freaks are going to pull some seriously heinous shit and take over the world? (Not that I’m saying I think that, but I do.) Did the claymation dog tap into some kind of national zeitgeist? Or can we throw sane caution to the winds and dare to imagine for a terrible moment that it was some kind of message—a warning—-leaked in all seriousness to a willfully deaf and disbelieving country?

Whatever the case, it’s been almost four days, and a clip of the thing still isn’t up on YouTube. (When you search “Dick Cheney’s dog”, for instance, you get “hot ass titty girls XXX”, footage of some mad bodybuilder, and some shit about Lieberman.) Make of that what you will.

Hold me.