The critters out there are getting deadline savvy. Enemy Central files each Friday afternoon. Last Friday at about that time, eight Republican senators chose to make their move to vote against ANWR drilling, hoping to sneak under our radar (paid for along most everything else in our shop by Big Oil, which practically writes our copy each time we defend gas guzzling, offshore oil fields, and the Cheney-Halliburton connection). But little did that weasely eight suspect we’d catch up with them a week later, when their vote had cooled and hardened into a symbol of what’s wrong with the world as know it.

Let’s line up these honorary caribou. There’s Illinois’s Pete Fitzgerald, who remains convinced the Alaskan Exxon spill polluted Lake Michigan. New Hampshire’s Bob Smith said no to ANWR drilling, but then he says no to everything. Besides, he always sounds like somebody just back from an unpleasant drilling experience at the dentist’s. Remember the Maine women, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, who don’t like oil as such (with a name as majestic and pristine as Olympia’s, can you really blame her?). Maine’s booming backwater economy is evidence enough of what an oil-free environment can do to improve local lives. Ohio’s Mike DeWine said no, perhaps because he couldn’t vote for a tax increase; Oregon’s Gordon Smith did the same, because he’d heard voices from key constituents who reside on tree tops. Then there was Rhode Island’s vindictive, never-before-elected Lincoln Chafee, who refuses to believe Alaska is larger than his state. The final Republican no vote was cast by Democrat for Life John McCain, who’s been advised by key backer Marshall Wittmann that cactus oil is the petroleum of the future. We always suspected McCain was a tool of the Arizona Cactus Cartel.

But how to explain the yes votes on Alaskan drilling by Hawaii’s Senators Akaka and Inouye, who represent the most Democratic state in the history of the union? A gesture of solidarity by the nation’s 50th state toward the 49th? A shrewd move to destroy Alaskan tourism? Anyway, we thought Sen. Inouye stood out at the Iran-contra hearings and it’s good to know he’s still going strong.

Tom Daschle was hoping to remain missing in action, but our veteran agent Jack Hughes caught up with him in Illinois, where the majority leader has been promising big petrodollars to the Daley machine in order to begin reconstruction drilling at O’Hare International, a consortium more powerful than Enron and Halliburton combined. Our friends at OPEC tell us the O’Hare deal clinches Illinois for the Democrats for decades to come.

We’ll need O’Hare airport in safe hands, now that Charles de Gaulle, our favorite landing site in Paris, is soon to be renamed Jean Marie Le Pen Petain International. Everyone is out to get the craziest frog (it’s okay now to use such disparaging language, n’est-ce pas?) since the days of Tartuffe (who actually wasn’t crazy). But apart from everything else, we never trusted a guy. Would you trust a male whose middle name is Mary?

We’ve got a bigger problem on our hands, and as we write the hope is that he’s been subjected to a bit of hands-on branding down at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. Who is this clown Abdullah, who comes calling on the President of the United States and accepts his hospitality while letting it be known that if we do not throw Israel to the wolves he and all the other self-appointed princes of Araby will cut us off from their spigots and proceed to behave as some combination of Osama bin Laden and Colonel Qaddafi? Well, it’s clear he’s got us shaking in our SUVs. This is the thanks we get for saving his sorry desert from Middle East developer Saddam Hussein?

But again we have to assume our President knows what he’s doing. He’s tricked the guy into turning himself in. Now the next step is to tell him there’s a presidential ranch in Guantanamo he’d also like to show him. Then fly him down without waiting for permission from any military tribunal. Just reassure him he’s bound to feel at home among the many current ranch hands who coincidentally speak the same language he does. Could turn out to be the longest all-paid vacation an Enemy of the Week has ever won.