The Onion may have grounds for legal action against the Bush administration for unfair competition.

After all, the administration is supposed to make its best effort to manage the affairs of state in a responsible manner. The Onion, a weekly humor publication that plays the news for laughs much as John Stewart’s "Daily Show" does, is supposed to satirize the inevitable mistakes, missteps and misdeeds.

But the month of February has seen the administration stealing The Onion’s thunder on a regular basis.

First, the vice president shot a guy in the face and then kept the story under wraps for a day.

Then, before the furor over Deadeye Dick’s "peppering" incident had died down, the administration got itself embroiled in a controversy over the determination of the president to approve a deal that would put six major U.S. ports under the operational control of a country that the bipartisan 9-11 Commission warned suffers from "a persistent counterterrorism problem."

The absurdity of the moment was placed in stark relief Thursday afternoon, when senior administration officials from the Departments of Defence, State, Treasury and Homeland Security trooped up to Capitol Hill to brief the Senate Armed Services Committee about the plan to let Dubai Ports World, a firm owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE)in charge of ports up and down the east coast.

Noting a particularly concerning line in the 9-11 Commission — "The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorismally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem" — U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, asked the administration representatives: "Just raise your hand if anybody (at the witness table) talked to the 9-11 commission," said Levin.

The senator’s request was met with blank stares.

It was a priceless moment, indeed, an Onion moment.

That’s the problem.

The way the administration is handling L’Affair Dubai is simply unfair to The Onion. How can a satirical newspaper satirize that which is beyond satire? What next? A plan to "fix" Social Security by betting the retirement security of millions of Americans on a stock market gamble? Oh, well, never mind.