I wholeheartedly agree with Sidney Blumenthal, who I think should be regarded as a national treasure.

A post declared that SB writes like a school marm...this is absurd, he's merely an essayist of the highest calibre, what was he expecting "Yo Bush, how's it hangin'"

Bush may well be a puppet of the one-party state as declared in yet anohter post (i.e the military industrial complex, oil, the Coroporations etc...) but he's also a malevolent, sadistic, brain-damaged, over-privileged and woefully under curious puppet. He loves the lure of easy certainty, he's full of odious religiosity, he 'feels' the pain of the mothers of the dead but won't go to any funerals and even more scandalously won't allow photographs of coffins to be shown (what kind of respect is that?). Bush has stiffed the soldiers and they know it, the generals are OK, they don't have to fight, as Colbert pointed out it's only the retired ones that suddenly speak out on Rumsfeld (namechecked by Kissinger, of all people, as the scariest man he'd ever met)

These are not epithets worthy of the greatest office of your great country.

I am nauseated by his endless stream of apologists, he's consciously bad and too many basically decent US citizens been suckered into his phony war on terror to fulfill the neocons mindless plan for 'full spectrum dominance', what more would it take for you the US to wake up? nothing would give me more satisfaction than to see the whole sorry-assed lot of them led away in handcuffs: Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Perle/Wolfowitz/Libby et al, but especially Cheney.

The Democrats are running scared from Bush, because they know that in the red states any nonsense that Bush comes out with has purchase, traction, and they can't be bothered to to do the hard work, to take risks, take a leadership and educational role and challenge the incompetent (but highly belligerent) and dangerous fools in the current and quite possibly worst ever US administration.

The Democrats just want to win again and get their noses into the trough of the amazing never ending corporate gravy train that is American politics.

The line "how will this play back home" is so telling, as it implies that your political representatives, have no generative power to speak of something they truly believe, namely, that the law is just plain bad, and if you don't agree with me "I will explain why"

When you have such a widespread and near-complete death of articulate speech and coherent argument (dumbing down) the race to the bottom to align oneself with existing ignorance and prejudice among key sections of the electorate is really a grievous-wound-to-the-body-politic just waiting to happen.

And to think that all this has been predicated on Bush's stunning reversal to 9/11 which could have been, "it happened on my watch, I will pay dearly for this" to - rather incredibly - "I am your greatest protector".

Now we find out from Woodward's 'State of Denial' that Tenet and Cofe warned Rice in no uncertain terms that a major attack was imminent, she, of course has no recollection of these dire and specific warnings. There must be some law of physics that says that when so many lies accumulate in the spaces that crowd out any possibility of truth a complete and spontaneous 'bonfire of the underwears' will surely and spontaneously errupt amongst the holders of office in this administration. Then, denial will become impossible.

As a brit I'm not too familiar with Maher, but I have seen a one hour special of his which was incredibly explicit and funny, also he does a show which plugs books on Amazon I seem to remember!!

I though his article was superb I particularly loved the lines about Paris Hilton and Bush selling you relief from the flies. The latter line reminds me of the immortal words I read (quite possibly in a letter here on Salon recently) that said:

Bush is the kind of guy who goes up to a hornets' nest poking around with a stick so that when the inevitable happens and you complain that 'he should not have done that' he calls you a hornet appeaser.

Top article, we need more humour a lot less democrat cowering and hopefully by Tues we can wipe the smile of the GOP's face, I don't hold out any real hope that they won't contrive to steal this one too though.

reading K-fed's responses to the questions, I was struck but what an 'optimist' he was. He seemed remarkably unbitter. This is a good attribute, anything else wrong with him is clearly down to

a) the astonishing hype surrounding his life with Britney

b) the fact that he's got something of an identity crisis and lacks the self-awareness and background social capital to get any genuine help

He doesn't seem to me to be a particularly odious person, merely deluded, and furthemore I doubt that we'll be hearing much more from him from now on (after the divorce hype has died down)

"Then, thanks to Toto, they discover that the Wizard is just a "man behind a curtain", not really a wizard at all, just a "humbug" as he himself admits..."

minus the fact that most of us pretty much knew this.

Great article and great ending sentence.