What Passes For Sanity

There are many emotions which cascade whenever our "Commander In Chief" deigns to share his psychosis with the nation.

You know delusion is on the way when George addresses you from, of all places, a library. At least he could have been skimming folios when the camera found him, attired in a smoking jacket and dickey, then settle himself into a plush leather chair and chattily impart his dementia. Instead, we get W at a makeshift podium looking constipated, and garbled audio worthy of a Holy Name meeting in the grade school cafeteria.

Maybe when he announces the invasion of Iran he'll do it lying on a sofa in the TV room. Or he and Cheney can take a page from Gleason and Carney...a harried Cheney looks up from the conference table saying "How I wish I had a war plan that could do the work of allll of theeese", at which point W bursts in. Cheney-"Pray tell who are you?". W -"Messiah of the Future". Cheney -"Can you bomb an reactor?". W -"Ha Ha..certainly I can bomb an reactor". Sorry..we're losin it.

Of the post-speech analysis, kudos to Fred Barnes for comparing W's situation to Lincoln's in the summer of 1864 before Sherman had taken Atlanta. What if Lincoln, Fred pondered, had decided to open peace negotiations with the South because the war was going badly? Of course for the analogy to work, the year would have to be 1868 and Sherman would have to be fighting an insurgency four years after he'd taken Atlanta. Unless Fred is waiting for General Petraeus to burn everything that moves between the Tigris and Euphrates. Apart from that, the only other flaw in Fred's analogy is that...uh...oh yes ...LINCOLN WAS FIGHTING FOR HIS OWN COUNTRY!!! A blithering idiot like Fred Barnes gets paid to spout this crap when, if karma existed, he'd be a taxi driver on a bomb-cratered Baghdad street, trying to get home safely to use his one hour of elecrticity.

And kudos to the surge architect Fred Kagan. Has anyone ever seen this guy? Boogle-eyed, gelatinous-necked caller for "troops". He and Bill Kristol combined would not be able to produce one testicle, yet these are the war's intellectual leaders. And incidentally...can we all stop throwing around the word "troops". Troops are not a thing that come in implements of 10,000. They are 20 year old kids with pimples and families and hopes for the future. And if anyone knows what it is they are being asked to do...feel free to tell us.

Finally...thanks to Martin Lewis for reminding everyone that the Pythons are Gods. Graham would have turned 66 this week, and if only the good Doctor Chapman were here to analyze last night's speech...perhaps this sums it up:

Voice Over: And now an appeal for sanity from the Reverend Arthur Belling.

(Cut to studio. A vicar sitting facing camera. He has an axe in his head.)

Reverend Belling: You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going 'squawk, squawk, squawk...' And then you can go 'Neurhhh! Neurhh!' and then you can roll around on the floor going 'pting pting pting' ... (he rolls around on the floor)

Voice Over: The Reverend Arthur Belling is Vicar of St Loony Up The Cream Bun and Jam.