Ever faster go the invisible needles sewing...

... the emperor's new clothes. Every time Bush gets really stupid in public, out come the tailors.

It's getting to be like puncturing the kids' balloons at a four-year-old's birthday party, but, young 'uns, Bush ain't smart. Even if he were born that way (and he wasn't), twenty-five years of spending his nights drunk and coked up and his days drunk and watching daytime TV didn't do his marginal intellect any good. And you can tell that none of that time was spent watching Jeopardy because he got all the geography and foreign rulers questions wrong in the 2000 campaign.

Why, oh, why didn't this horse's ass stay in baseball, where the worst he could have done was set fire to the stadium, or trade away Sammy Sosa, or drool a bit while fantasizing about the baselines being lines of blow?

But, President of these United States? Puhleeeeze. Pick the worst attributes of every bad president ever and he's got `em all. Along with a few that the psychiatrists are going to be stumbling over for decades to come just trying to name properly, let alone figure out.

Not a soul took Bush seriously when he said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." Everyone should have. I would say that someone–on his own self-described authority–who has assumed the power to spy on citizens without warrant, killed hundreds of thousands in wars of choice, imprisoned self-declared enemies and citizens alike without due process for indeterminate periods, authorized torture, discarded law, used the mechanisms of government to reward his cronies and thrown elections is getting pretty close to the commonly understood textbook definition of a dictator.

But, as long as the Constitution hasn't been suspended, there's no martial law or curfews, no shooting in the streets, and there are John Hindrockets and Tony Snowjobs to sing Bush's praises, everything's fine. Fine, that is, if you're the sort of person who'd like to sit down and have a beer with a dictator.