Stardate 20021123.0031

(Captain's log): Talk back to your computer! It's good for what ails you; relieves all your stresses. When the news reports are stupid, invent one-liners in response!

Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Bush on Friday the United States should not wage war alone against Iraq. We won't be alone; the UK's going to be right there with us.

...he put Bush on the spot by questioning whether White House allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are doing enough to fight terrorism. Of course they aren't. We'll get to them, by-and-by, after we've sent Saddam to his eternal reward.

"Where has Osama bin Laden taken refuge?" the Russian said in a joint news conference. In Hell, I would imagine, where he's waiting to greet Saddam.

NATO members have declared themselves united in backing U.N. efforts to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, but the 19-nation defense alliance stopped short of promising to go to war over it. NATO members were united in their fear that membership in the alliance might actually lead to them fighting.

Allied leaders agreed a shopping list of pooled purchases to try to close the vast gap in military capability between the United States and most of NATO's European members... and a year from now they'll have the best lip service that lack-of-money can buy.

Confusion persists within the Iraqi government over how to meet the Security Council's demand for a full account of chemical, biological and nuclear programs in the country, a U.N. spokesman said Friday. They're having difficulty finding the word "truth" in their dictionary.

Suppose there was such a thing as a time machine. Suppose all the bad-guy Germans of the 1930s and 1940s -- the Gestapo, the Brownshirts, the Blackshirts -- were fed into the time machine and emerged as modern-day Americans. Suppose they all still held the beliefs they had when they died. So my question is, Which political party would they support now, Democratic or Republican? Suppose that the same time machine then retrieved Lenin and Trotsky and all the Bolsheviks from the 1920's? Which party would they support?

OR: Do you realize that during the entire Cold War, Long Island was actually closer to Moscow than Manhattan? (Man, I knew we couldn't trust them suburban commies...)

OR: Phweee! Godwin's Law. Fifteen yard penalty and loss of down.

Iraq preps for imminent U.S. Attack. Well, at least someone out there is being realistic about something.