When the Sleeper Fakes:
Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, used to recall the Führer characterizing his own superhuman steadfastness as "the assurance of a sleepwalker".
The frightening implications of that infelicitous turn of phrase only struck Speer after the war when he was in Spandau Prison.
I'm not one of these Bush=Hitler bloggers, it's a mendacious nasty connotation IMHO....but something about Bush's robotic Q&A session last night called that quote to mind.
I wasn't even going to do anything on last night's Presidential press conference, but when I saw the dispirited somnambulant performance put on by Bush, I revised my plan.
Bush is like a callow seventeen year old trying to explain the half consumed vodka bottle found in his bedroom.
He doesn't even sound convinced by his own bullsh*t!
He repeats himself endlessly, sheer repetition might be wearing down even this famously on-message politician.
Hell, Bush's biggest effort last night was paradoxically devoted to NOT calling on the venerable Helen Thomas, whose seniority in the press room means nothing to the vengeful White House Gang.

Tom Shales the teevee critic at the Washington Post has suggested that Bush might have been a wee bit medicated last night which supposedly accounts for his listless monotonal delivery.
This is a nice oblique way of suggesting the Prez is off the wagon as well...
However I'm a sunny optimistic christian who prefers to think that like most people with fatally truncated attention spans Bush is starting to find his own lies boring.
He may even be waking up to the fact that this whole soul-draining slog to war is Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz's collective idea from the git go.
When puppets awake to their status as useful toys, there usually a certain amount of psychic pain involved.
Or who knows maybe he WAS drunk and the whole room turned into a festering snake pit complete with cobras spitting questions about North Korea at his head.
THAT would account for his half-hypnotized demeanor....
:)
Such is the Kingdom of Hell
On the congressionally licensed airwaves and elsewhere
3-7-03 1:07pm EST