On May 13th Chongo Chimp sent a seismic shock wave through the 2008 presidential election campaign with this shocking diatribe against gorillas:

"They're butt ugly. They stink. Most of 'em got a brain about the size of a pea, and it has to think through about 6 inches of solid bone all around. Not good. Never ask a gorilla to solve a simple problem for you, you will end up with a far bigger problem: the frikkin' gorilla! Talkin' to a gorilla is a lot like talkin' to a tractor or a dead dog, only the tractor won't talk back and the dead dog won't bite. Gorillas are the grit in life's vaseline. They ain't worth the time to spit on or the cost of a bullet. If they was all shipped off to Schenectady, that would be just fine with me. I don't like Schenectady much, and I ain't goin' there any time soon. How many gorillas does it take to change a lightbulb? Too many, that's how many. If you got a lightbulb that needs changin', my advice is do it yourself and save a whole bunch of unnecessary trouble."

Videos of the Chongo statement on Youtube have received more than 20 million hits already and the controversy refuses to go away. Gorillas have abandoned the Chongo campaign in droves, mostly switching their support to either Hillary Clinton (43%) or Barack Obama (41%), with 6% of gorillas saying they will vote for McCain, 2% for Nader, and 8% still undecided.

Several violent incidents have erupted in the Chicago area involving confrontations between Chongo supporters and angry gorillas.

Chongo has thus far refused to issue a retraction, but all indications are that some statement on his part will soon be forthcoming to "stem the bleeding" and get his campaign back on track, although most pundits feel that he has probably been done irreparable damage by what has come to be known as Gorilla-Gate.

Is this the end for Chongo's hopes? Has the dream of putting a chimp into the Oval Office in 2008 been decisively stopped dead in its tracks?

"Let me put it this way," said Bert Zielkowski, political commentator for W-APE in Chicago. "At the beginning of this campaign Chongo's chances of being elected president of the USA were about as good as the chances of a blind, three-legged, 30-year-old horse winning the Kentucky Derby. His chances now are more comparable to the chances of that same horse winning the Kentucky Derby if it had also died a week before the race."