I was playing Scrabble the other day and I made the word “nucular.” My opponent asked what the word was, so I explained that “nucular” refers to the splitting of atoms for all kinds of life enriching activities like generating electricity and blowing things up. My opponent challenged my spelling of the word and pulled out a dictionary.

When I couldn’t find the word as I had spelled it in the dictionary, I chose to invoke Special Presidential Privilege to insist that the correct spelling of the word is, indeed, “nucular,” because that’s the way our President pronounces it. And since the leader of the Free World says it is so, then it must be so.

Special Presidential Privilege (or SPP as it is known on The Hill) is a kind of professional version of the “King’s X” rule we used to invoke on the playground when the game wasn’t going quite our way. SPP has been found to be very useful in a variety of political circumstances.

For example, it allowed the President to tell us there were WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRUCTION in Iraq when none were found. Under the rules of SPP, though, GW could not be accused of lying to the American people. Instead, SPP provided for the U.S. government to begin spending $200 million per day to invade Iraq in order to find the necessary facts to support the theory. Even though we haven’t found them yet, one has to admire the tenacity with which our government continues to search for them. At the time of this writing, the cost-to-date (not counting lives) is approaching $300 billion and may well reach $1 trillion before we finally find the right set of facts.

SPP has proven to be one of our most useful weapons for fighting terrorists. It provides the vehicle this country has long needed to be able to, on the one hand, yell “foul” when our opponents violate the Geneva Convention while, on the other, allowing us to hold suspected terrorists in conditions that would make a Nazi camp commander proud.

SPP provides for the virtual suspension of the Bill of Rights at the whim of Washington politicians without that generally bothersome Due Process for which we Americans have a troubling fondness. This makes it possible for the government to secretly gather records of who’s calling whom so they can determine whether or not I might have some tenuous tie to suspected terrorists. But, hey, if our President says this is okay, who am I to argue?

But I digress. My real point is that I seem to have a dictionary that is in error. I should think this would be especially distressing to the First Librarian because, after all, if we need to rewrite dictionaries, who knows how many other books we need to rewrite? Grammar books? Apparently. History books? Probably. Math books? Who knows, maybe under SPP two plus two now equals five.

And, lest we forget the impact of this dire situation on other areas of the economy, the makers of Scrabble and any other game that entails the use of letters should probably consider changing the frequency distribution of certain letters; perhaps replacing some of the e’s and a’s with u’s. Thankfully, though, I understand Donald Rumsfeld has volunteered for what is probably the most daunting task facing this nation – namely retraining Vanna White as to just what vowels appear where.

Oh, and if you disagree with this editorial, then I invoke SPP and these words have never been written.