Prose With Punch

One of the good things - about the only good thing, unless it can inspire real change - about people getting angry about Bush's lies is that it sometimes inspires some very nice pieces of angry prose.

For example, the following sample is from an article by Maureen Dowd, which is being widely syndicated:

"We now have an amazing image of the president and the dictator, both divorced from reality over weapons, glaring at each other from opposite sides of bizarro, paranoid universes where fiction trumped fact.

"It would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many Iraqis and Americans hadn't died in Iraq.

"These two would-be world-class tough guys were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to show that they couldn't be pushed around. Their trusted underlings misled them with fanciful information on advanced Iraqi weapons programs that they credulously believed because it fit what they wanted to hear.

"Saddam was swept away writing his romance novels, while President Bush was swept away with the romance of rewriting the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war to finish off the thug who tried to kill his dad.

"The two men both had copies of "Crime and Punishment" — Condi Rice gave Mr. Bush the novel on his trip to Russia in 2002, and Saddam had Dostoyevsky down in the spider hole — but neither absorbed its lesson: that you can't put yourself above rules just because you think you're superior."