Classic

The bottom line, which an odd member of the punditburo might even reach one of these days, is that this is an administration that no longer makes any sense at all -- not even on the most formal, semiotic level. Shrub's speechwriters have literally been reduced to babbling, a relentlessly on-message babbling that shows just how ill suited the tools of domestic politics are for conducting a half-way serious foreign policy, much less an extremely serious war.

The sonic results are equally strange: Bush keeps belting the stuff out with his usual gospel fervor, even though it has degenerated into near gibberish. At times it starts to sound almost like accidental poetry, like listening to an old recording of Allen Ginsberg reciting Howl -- "I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, etc." Except Ginsberg had a better sense of meter and wasn't a war criminal.