It's not so much that the floating specks add weight. It's that these tiny pollutants act as a catalyst to retain fat from the rest of the food that we eat. In a polluted environment, it only takes a couple of breaths and the good stuff gets wasted while the bad stuff goes right to your belly, hips, thighs, chin and chloresterol count, everywhere except where you might want it.

Felix Fertilfinger, of the government's Department of Special Studies, first noticed this phenomena during a seventy million dollar program to study why farmers, mountain climbers, and others spending their time in less populated parts of the country seemed to have less body fat than urbanites who jog along the East River of New York City or only go outside to catch a bus, cab, limo, or the subway on the way to work, shopping, a movie, or whatever.

Worst of all, the government now figures that this, as well as the West Nile Virus, all started in Sadaam Hussein's complex of hidden biological warfare laboratories. He has been adding the black specks and gazillions of mosquito eggs to oil shipped to the United States. His motto, "you want it, we got it," seems to be working in his favor.

Driving cars and burning gas only helps spread these evil elements. It's what Sadaam has been up to since UN inspectors were thrown out of his country in 1998 after many years of not being able to locate the ever shifting biological laboratories now believed to be housed in city buses and parking lots.

Don't worry, now that the cause has been isolated the government will take swift action. Many are advocating we immediately nuke all cities in Iraq while others are claiming this will only spread the problem. The nukers claim they can bag the country before much spreading occurs and anything drifting on the wind will go to countries we don't like anyway, but Congress insists that any such job be done by union employees and that a fair pension plan accompany the operation.

Informed sources who wish to remain anonymous tell this reporter that they, the new military base of operations in Tampa, have been dealing with mosquitoes for a long time and the only solution is to bomb them. They claim this must be done before their diseases carry to stronger species like palmetto bugs (cracker talk for cockroaches). Any delay could be disastrous even spreading to the Everglades ecological system that feeds the Atlantic Ocean and Al Gore.

Other sources in Washington claim that many previous mysteries like mad cow and Legionnaire's disease can be attributed to Sadaam's earlier efforts to develop biological weapons of mass destruction.

Taking steps to eliminate this evildoer might go a long way towards the reduction of e-coli, aids, Parkinson's, cancer, and other diseases since no one in Iraq knows how to do it except Sadaam. Fidel Castro might be in on the secret but we can take care of him next.

The real propaganda you are about to receive will be much more dramatic than this. The reality is that the war on Iraq is already underway. American troops have been actively engaged in both the Northern and Southern "no fly" zones of Iraq since the early days of August. They have been establishing air bases and other facilities necessary to an attack on central Iraq that will be presented as an internal uprising of Kurd forces similar to the Northern Alliance that was so helpful in Afghanistan. And the American people will buy it, enthusiastically supporting the idea that we send additional troops to help in the final invasion.

A dictator does not need to justify any of his actions.