WASHINGTON – President Bush today predicted that the economy would remain “strong enough to weather any turbulence,” sending the Dow tumbling down 597 points.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was quick to point out that the stock markets “move due to a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors,” and, taking a swig from a bottle of Cuervo Gold, continued to note that “there is no, ahh, conclusive evidence that the President’s remarks… inevitably pound the world’s financial markets.”

Yet others have cited nearly 8 years of direct evidence to the contrary.  Author David B. Brownington’s 2006 book “The Bush Effect,” in fact positively correlated 2,314 “positive public remarks” by the President to a sizeable dip in the Dow, NASDAQ, AMEX, FTSE, and Hang Seng stock exchanges.  “It’s an almost magical gift,” Brownington writes, “to be so consistently mistrusted on such a wide variety of issues.”  Mega investor Warren Buffet, meanwhile, summed it up neatly at a recent speech to stockholders: “When this guy speaks, short the market or die.”