The record shows that bitter cold besieged the nation for two weeks in a row. The chill split pavements and cracked even the deepest water mains. A death-dealing, icy shroud enveloped the country, commencing on the first official calendar day of winter, immediately after an unseasonable warm spell in late November when many citizens had resorted to wearing tee shirts and cutoffs for relief. The depth of winter in the North Central states was notoriously cruel, but a stab at the entire realm by such a frozen spear of untimely low temperature so early in the season was unknown within memory.

The national political party in opposition to President William Tecumseh Highhat, loyal members of the Dollar Party, claimed that the President commanded Federal resources, namely the military, which could be rightfully employed to solve the problem. In a chorus, national Dollarite leaders demanded that the President order Army, Navy, and Air Force units, not to provide emergency relief to citizens attacked by the unexpected blast, but to confront those responsible for it.

For two years, the opposition had shaken their fists in angry speeches, denouncing the Chief Executive for being soft on global warming. They held inquiries and committee hearings. They sought testimony. They issued press releases and made speeches. They voted resolutions of intent and calls to action. All of the hubbub was calculated to show the President would continue to fiddle while the nation would inevitably burn.

"If other countries are belching crap into the atmosphere that's driving our environment nuts, why don't we stop them in their tracks?" loyal members of the opposition argued. "What did we build all those bombs for anyway?"

The President ignored them, or went on vacations to Camp David where he and his wife and daughter received private lessons in nodding and smiling, or he gave bland speeches in inappropriate venues about the economy.

"In just twenty-five more years," he lectured a group of Octogenarians gathered to hear about his efforts to save Medicare health insurance, "You will be able to enjoy more fulfilling opportunities in jobs which employ cutting edge technology and ultra high bandwidth communication with workers in every other country on this planet, thanks to my administration's absolutely foreign policies." He finished that speech even though some short-skirted aide whispered in his ear that within a quarter century most of his audience would most likely be deceased.

He continued to ignore growing calls by Dollarites for accountability. He dismissed rumors that he might step down.

"I will be in my office until the last second of the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the last year of my term," he announced. "I will even skip lunch."

He excelled in public broadcasts revealing him as earthy, charming, and glib while conducting intimate, low-key, fireside chats alla Roosevelt in front of bookshelves stocked with back issues of the Reader's Digest. He absolutely glowed while giving irrelevant speeches. He spoke everywhere and on all sorts of occasions. At the inauguration of a new water project, he lauded his lovely, lawyer wife and the example she set by helping small children wolf down vitamins. On Thanksgiving, he prayed for his Vice President who crusaded to plug tiny minds to the Internet. Prior to boarding Air Force One on his way to crack a Champagne bottle over the head of Yasser Arafat, he rhetorically asked a reporter in a chummy little interview relayed on national television, "Isn't a role as advisor and educator the sort of relationship I should be building with the American people?" He offered that sound bite question in a have-another-cup-of-coffee voice after checking his TV makeup in a mirror to be sure his temples were as gray and fatherly as an jumbo jet captain.

However, the President's pleasant talks and calm self-assurance didn't calm the opposition Dollarites. Even members of his own party, historically known as the Heaven-Help-Us Party, began to question whether he kept all his marbles in one bag. At year's end in the second year of his second term, as unseasonable cold howled around the Capitol building in Washington, bitter and ambitious opposition politicos enacted a plan to bring him down in hopes of installing one of their own.

"Doesn't this man realize the danger we all face in the coming crisis?" Senator Buffonoodle, a staunch Dollar man from Tennessee, cried to assembled newsmen in a press conference he staged on the Capitol steps during New Years Day. "Many worthy colleagues have heard from prominent scientists slaving day and night over computerized projections of impending weather cycles. All studies demonstrate how aspects of the environmentalist claims about global warming are not only true, but threaten the value of investments our citizens have staked out in every country on this planet."

The reporters held aloft their portable tape recorders to catch every word. Photographers snapped away. And press aides cursed the day they ever imagined that covering a political beat could be exciting because they'd never imagined witnessing a speech at minus twenty degrees. The squad of diligent scribblers, draped and hooded and huddled against blowing snow, aimed their cherry noses at the figure of the outraged spokesman and listened. Dramatically, Senator Buffonoodle buttoned his thickly padded coat over the two sweaters he wore, made sure his woolly gloves were hitched up and stamped his feet on the frost covered concrete. He shouted into the row of microphones standing before him.

"Can't the President see that global warming is going to cook our goose?" the Senator roared.

"Pardon me, Senator," interrupted an incredulous reporter for the Gosh Awful News Network, GANET, "But did you say warming? What do you call this?" he asked, waving his hand in a circle to indicate the snow flurry inhibiting his view of the Senator standing only thirty feet away.

"This is just a unusual low between fiery highs," the Senator brushed off the query. "It's hell fire we're worried about. Read about it in the Bible. It threatens everything we believe in, profits. As I was saying, if it weren't for the foresightedness of our bankers and major corporate managers, we wouldn't even be part of the globalization game. But those brilliant and provident men and women have made sure we own and control the best and most promising resources on the planet. Where economic crisis has struck down the hard working and the industrious, in Asia, in Latin America, and in the republics of the former Soviet Union, our investors have intervened with their money and ours to buy whole countries in order to save them from disaster. Our financial wizards are just the right people to make sure those economic treasures are exploited for the benefit of every man, woman, and child loyal to our democratic values of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But will they be able to perform their economic miracles? No. Because the Executive Branch of this government is run by a liar and dissembler like Bill Highhat."

The Senator paused for effect, slapping his gloves together to spur circulation. His frosty breath created an impressive fog. Raising an index finger portentously, he continued.

"What does our President do? Nothing! He ignores the threat to our future, the interests of the American people, and the well-being of those we've paid to step aside so we can run their countries in the best way possible. He simply ignores the threat of global warming. We will not stand for it."

At that moment, the Senator's enthusiastic gesticulations caused him to slip on the icy pavement. He fell forward and fatally impaled himself on microphones from three major networks and was featured on the both the seven and eleven o'clock news. Delighted Dollar party hacks used the event to crank up their media campaign against the Prez. They distributed thousands of posters showing Buffonoodle's iron rod stiff frozen body bridging two chairs, head on one, feet on the other. A fast thinking congressional aide, promoted soon afterward by acclamation to Dollar party national campaign manager, had quickly arranged the body for a fortuitous photo opportunity amidst the storm outside the Capitol dome. All the reporters present had applauded the aide's originality, then snapped and scribbled before sliding away to telephone in their scoop. The Senator had been transfixed in a flash by the accident. His mouth and eyes remained open and defiant. His begloved finger pointed ominously at the sky, while three chrome shafts obviously pierced the front of his winter coat and dripping microphones poked out the back.

In the Dollar Party poster, the Senator's body spanned the caption "Act Before Armageddon."

Within days, the expediently dead Buffonoodle had been promoted to a national byword. His charges of Executive Neglect energized growing clamor in the House of Representatives. The speaker, Representative Harangle from Georgia, an opposition party member himself, had to pound the podium with his hammer and shout for calm in the midst of a tidal wave of Dollar calls for the President's resignation and answering boos from Heaven-Help-Usites. With only minutes to spare before vegetable tossing and fist fights broke out, the speaker rushed a motion to the floor, insisting that the President move his State of the Union speech to January Sixth, the next day, or face impeachment for gross neglect of Presidential duty. "We will not allow a President of a nation as important and powerful and vital to the world as ours to dodge a problem as big as global warming," yelled Harangle. "And could somebody please turn up the heat. It's freezing in this chamber."

Bill, sensing a terrific opportunity to seize the national stage and act fatherly, locked all his best speech writers into a White House cloak closet, shouting through the bolted door that he could do the job of speechifying entirely by himself.

"I am ashamed and deeply sorry for the mealy-mouthed prevarications created by my staff," he droned solemnly on TV, informing the public of the hastily arranged State of the Union message. "I will not delay. Your representatives have demanded a statement on the condition of the Union and I'm not one to keep a secret. I will simply no longer rely on the kind of people who have disappointed me and you, the good citizens, the green carded residents, the temporary H1 visa workers, and the many illegal aliens working so hard to make our great nation greater. I will face you tomorrow and explain in my own words why I have considered the charges that I've neglected global warming a non-issue, a political football, a partisan issue created by an opposition jealous of the popularity I've earned by my devotion to women, cute children, disenfranchised minorities, but especially women. None, not one member of the Dollar Party, has opened themselves up to women as I have. Not one of them spends the kind of time I do on domestic problems. Not one of them is married to my wife. I have heavy burdens in foreign affairs as well. I must carry the responsibility of military might on my shoulders. And I must watch out for threats to the interests of our nation and our people. I am aware of the dangers posed by the very people the late Senator Buffonoodle warned us about, but he misapprehended the threat completely. Our nation does face a lethal threat as I will explain in my speech tomorrow. Thank you and have a nice day."

As everyone knows who has any knowledge of the pre-Ice-Age records exhumed from the late Twentieth Century, the next day never came. Before President William Tecumseh Highhat could explain why global warming was not a threat, as members of the Dollar Party had claimed, the planet froze as stiff as a board and nothing changed position for four hundred years, not even the Heaven-Help-Us Party.