Archbishop Clegthorpe

I wonder whether the reaction of the US media to this new, even worse Downing Street memo will be as torpid as it was to the first one. As someone who was hornswoggled by Colin Powell's UN performance, I'm particularly enraged to read excerpts from the playbook for duping me and my ilk. Will this, too, be yawned off, just another war crime of yesteryear?

I'm reminded of the moment in Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers, when a character reacts to the news that the Radical Liberal party's spokesman for agriculture, Sam Clegthorpe, an agnostic, has been named Archbishop of Canterbury: "Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. 'Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a career in veterinary medicine.'"

Bush and Blair didn't want Saddam to cooperate with Hans Blix? Of course! We didn't want to find WMD's. We wanted to find a pretext to legalize regime change. On another planet, this might be impeachable. On ours, only fellatio rises to that level of outrage.