Quote of the day: In Estonia, Chimpy the Prez shows that he's not goin' to say "civil war" and you can't foment him into sayin' it so don't even try

"There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place [in Iraq], fomented in my opinion because of the attacks by Al Qaeda causing people to seek reprisal."
--President Bush, at his news conference yesterday in Estonia, en route to Latvia for the NATO summit meeting (he's seen above in Riga with Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga)

Actually, you don't get the full measure of the quality of the president's, er, "thinking"--the degree to which his "opinion" is based on not having the quaintest clue what's going on--unless you hear him running on about all that fomentin' going' on in Iraq. (Thank you, Keith Olbermann.) Given the level of fantasy and delusion going on here, there seems hardly any point in pointing out that any strength that Al Qaeda has in Iraq (and never mind that American military mouths were dismissing it just a week or two ago) is wholly owing to our efforts.

Of course, the president's immediate language problem was the desperate need to avoid the forbidden words "civil war." If we have any hope of making sense of this, we would do well to turn to the cartoon world. (Or perhaps we should say we're turning from an unintentional cartoon to an intentional one.)