The lunacy that bothers me is not the stuff you find in Bedlam - people raging at the walls: that's what sane people do now; it's the new variety that comes from poverty of spirit: the popular, well-dressed, well-heeled and well-spoken lunacy that elects mad leaders to make mad wars upon the unfortunate and the dispossessed - the lunacy of the soul; of cold human hollowness, emotional flatness and numbness, moral emptiness; all surrounded with a gargantuan, manic and carefully disguised greed as a remedy for pain and the fear of death: the clever, well-adapted madness that the world rewards and to which the world aspires. -- Michael Leunig, A manicured madness takes hold.

George: Where's all them Sydneysiders, folks?
All: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

While journalists are hiding their contempt by reporting with humour as they try to seriously assess the gibberish coming out of Dubya's mouth and the blind subservience of Australia's Prime Mistake, Chaser members, "Fearless" Chas Licciardello and Julian Morrow, have been detained for staging a fake motorcade through Fortress Sydney. Who knows if we'll ever see them again.

Links on the Chaser boys:
• SMH
• Daily Telegraph
• The Australian
• Herald Sun

One sample of journalist tongue in cheek:

Misha Schubert, Leader of the free whirl breezes by:

George Bush is a man who likes a short sentence. Which is not to say the President of the United States reduces ideas to bite-sized chunks. Or maybe it is.

Either way, during the course of his first 24 hours in Sydney, there were plenty of efficient exclamations. Like the exchange on the tarmac as Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile inquired how things were going in Iraq. "We're kicking ass," he declared. In a similarly thrifty oratory bent yesterday, he telegraphed his lunch order — "I'm a meat guy".

Leunig's quote comes home with a vengeance, as, dumbfounded, we observe the shenanigans of a pair of old Y chromosomes who accidentally got elected to high office and who were never, ever up to the job.

Finally, Dr Anthony Ashbolt, politics lecturer at the University of Wollongong, worries that the "heavy-handed police tactics at APEC will "in fact, create the very circumstances [they] are trying to avoid." Philip Ruddock will certainly be hoping for proof that his Stasi-like anti-terror laws can be put to the test.

If that doesn't work, there is still hope for those who lust after a police state. As Bruce Dudon wrote in a letter to The Age, "Someone will pop a balloon near Bush. Howard will cry 'terrorism!' and the polls will return to normal."

George: Put 'er there, pardner.
John: Whoops, I missed.

-- Bilegrip Admin