Monday

"I'm The Decider and I decide what is best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense," President Bush said last week. (Crooks & Liars has the video.)

This strikes me as Bush's version of "The buck stops here." But note the difference. The plaque on President Truman's desk implied that he accepted ultimate responsibility for any decisions made. Bush's phrasing has less to do with accepting responsibility than with asserting power.

It reminds me of the way Bush never refers to himself as a "wartime president," but rather as a "war president."

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"The Oil Can, at least for the moment, looks like he has tomorrow off …"

— Vin Scully, October 25, 1986

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Also from C&L, this video of a touchingly earnest Kirk Cameron and someone named Ray Comfort explaining intelligent design.

Watching Mr. Comfort is like listening to Lucy sing "Little Known Facts" in You're a Good Man Charlie Brown — he's not just wrong, he's condenscending to those who aren't as misinformed as he is.

Anyway, Comfort's explanation of how the Intelligent Design of a banana proves creationism looks like a demonstration from one of those sex education classes he doesn't want kids to have. With the sound off, he seems to be making an argument from nature for something else entirely. With the sound on, you can hear him argue that a banana is perfectly "designed" to be peeled from the stem, which — as every monkey knows — is backwards.

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We haven't heard anything from Fafnir and Giblets in a few weeks and I'm starting to get worried. It could mean the zombies are back. Or the killer robots. Or Dick Cheney. Or the killer-robot zombie Cheney …

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Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher is not shrill — and that's what's so scary about his editorial "A Crisis Almost Without Equal."

Mitchell is dispassionate, matter of fact. He's just calmly stating what he takes to be an obvious truth: The presidency of George W. Bush puts the survival of America in jeopardy.

"How worried should we be about the possible damage he might inflict?" Mitchell asks. The president's defenders would answer that the nation will probably survive the Bush administration. Probably. They hope.

As far as damning with faint praise, that ranks up/down there with possibly not as bad as James Buchanan.