Bush Whacked

It's getting harder to know if the chaps in charge of things are grounded in seriousness or merely possess an odd sense of humor, for increasingly it seems they're intent on running the country on the basis of preppie-Ivy League farces and pranks. (As we all know George W. showed up at Yale, Dick Cheney studied smugness at the same institution, and Donald Rumsfeld did advanced undergraduate work in looking stern at Princeton. I think I'll send my daughter to a state university, thank you very much.) I realize W. in particular has been emboldened by unexpected popularity--who woulda thunk it, especially the White House--but his "aw-shucks" politics are getting truly bizarre, even for the already bizarre world of politics.
W. served up his latest knee-slapper at a White House breakfast for congressional leaders. He said--with that lovable, goofy innocence which only he and Mortimer Snerd can pull off--that "now is not the time to be playing politics, or using the debt ceiling as an excuse for some individual's cause" because "we're at war." He was referring to his recent request to extend the nation's credit-card limit by another $750 billion to $6.7 trillion. Of course this unfortunate necessity sprang from the administration's deliberate surplus-disappearance act which the media have deemed less deserving of critical coverage than a stain on some gold-digging intern's dress, but what the hell. We live in a brave and oblivious new world.