Yuk It Up, Boy Bush:
Imagine if Bill Clinton had walked out at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner, where Presidents traditionally poke fun at themselves, and stuck a cigar in his mouth and said, "Mmmmm, tastes like kosher pussy." Imagine if he had showed slides of himself sitting on a toilet, using legal documents to wipe his ass, and said, "That's where the Rose Law Firm documents went." Imagine if he showed a slide of Al Gore in a blue dress and said, "I told Monica it made Al look fat, but I jacked off on him anyways." Imagine the hue and cry. Imagine the outrage. Tom DeLay would have been burning down the Congress to censure him. If the members of the press had laughed, all anyone would say is how their laughter confirms that the media really is "liberal."

So you get the idea of why, when George W. Bush spoke at the dinner this week, it was perhaps, in the best possible spin, in poor taste for him to show slides of himself searching the Oval Office while Bush narrated, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." He made the joke three times in his "performance." And perhaps you might understand why John Kerry and an American vet of this war are a wee bit upset. And you might wonder how out of touch the press is when the majority of the people in the room laughed at the "joke," as David Corn describes. And maybe you can wonder just how out of touch the President, his people, and the Republicans defending the remarks can be if they think this is such a laughing matter.

But, instead, let's put it this way: Bush's performance is actually an admission of something his administration has refused to say: that they will never find the alleged WMDs, that they are as big a fantasy as the joke photo - the search as set-up for the punchline. And what a punchline. As recently as last week, Donald Rumsfeld and others in the White House have been insisting that David Kay was speaking too soon, that Iraq is plenty big, and that the weapons could still be out there. How can anyone in the administration say that now that even they feel free to joke about the falsehood of the major reason they gave for consigning 600 American soldiers to death in the sandy streets and highways of Iraq?