The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be X-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube. The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, same way actual conditions in the outside world bounce off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership. Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.

Here we have a Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who gazes at the rubble of Lebanon, at 600,000 refugees being strafed with cluster bombs, and squeaks happily that we are witnessing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East."

Here we have a President, George W. Bush, who urges Vladimir Putin to commence in Russia the same "institutional change" that is making Iraq a beacon of freedom and free expression. Not long after Bush extended this ludicrous invitation, the United Nations relayed from Iraq's Ministry of Health the country's real casualty rate, which is now at 100 a day, probably nearer 200.

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