Bush Meets With Edward Gibbon

WASHINGTON - As part of the ongoing effort to determine his place among previous absolute rulers of the world, President Bush met today with historian Edward Gibbon.

Gibbon, author of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, was given three minutes alone with Bush in the Oval Office to explain how unchecked power leads to institutional decay.

Despite the limited time frame, Gibbon, speaking afterwards with reporters in the White House driveway, said he came away impressed. "He is quite hard to classify in that he is more delusional than Caligula and less artistic than Nero. He is consistently cruel and self-centered in the manner of a Commodus, yet possessed of a combination of effeminacy and abject physical cowardice that I have never previously encountered."

Gibbon was not ready to give the President a final grade. "From everything I can tell this Bush person is perhaps a Caesar at best. It is said that the true Emperor lives deep beneath the sewers of a place called the Naval Observatory. Whatever that is."