A recent poll by CBS News shows that a majority of Americans now believe that America is "losing its grip on Iraq."

"Zis is completely untrue," said Dr. Hendritch Schmock, an expert on grips, and Senior Lecturer at The International Institute of Holding Things in Zurück.

"Ze grip is usually understood as to be having something firmly in ze hand, something in ze control of ze gripper, as it were. In order to lose a grip, one must have had a grip to begin with. Some people need to get a grip, if you know what I mean." Immediately after making this statement, Dr. Schmockman was taken away and sawed in half by a man who, it later turned out, had misrepresented himself to be a magician.

Further polling did indeed show that most Americans had no idea what a grip was and defined it as a "wiggly kind of fleeting and possibly recklessly destructive groping" of an object.

"I didn't mean we had lost our grip on Iraq," Clyde Beducklesdale of Sourwood, Omaha explained. "I meant we had lost our grope."