Indeed, today's Washington has a whiff of Soviet ways; suffocating internal discipline, resentment of even reasoned, moderate opposition, and a refusal to admit even the tiniest error. For imperialists, read "evildoers". With their condescending "we know best" attitude, Messrs Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest offer as close an impersonation of the Politburo as you will find. As was said of the pre-glasnost Kremlin then, so with the White House now: you know nothing, but understand everything.

Bush telegraph: selected presidential facts

In May 2001, Bush's government gave $43m to the Taliban.

Bush has never attended a funeral or memorial service for a soldier killed in Iraq.

In August this year, Bush took the second-longest holiday ever by a US president: 28 days.

Bush's 16-member cabinet is the wealthiest in US history, with an average fortune of $10.9m each.

As governor of Texas, Bush executed 152 prisoners.

Sixty-one people who raised $100,000 for Bush's 2000 election campaign have since been given government posts.

Nine members of Bush's Defense Policy Board sit on the board of defence contractors or are advisers.

Bush owns more than 250 autographed baseballs.

Bush has been arrested three times: for stealing a Christmas wreath from a hotel; for ripping down the Princeton goal posts after a Princeton-Yale game; and for drunk driving.

Bush infuriated the Russian media by spitting a wad of chewing gum into his hand before signing 2002's historic Treaty of Moscow with Vladimir Putin.

While appearing on the David Letterman show in 2000, Bush was caught surreptitiously cleaning his glasses on the jacket of the programme's executive producer, Maria Pope.


In pleadings with a federal court in defense of the ban, New York City lawyers asserted the "suggestion that a crèche is a historically accurate representation of an event with secular significance is wholly disingenuous."

He pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and then spent his purgatory as director of a neo-conservative thinktank, denouncing the Oslo Accords and arguing that "tomorrow's lobby for Israel has got to be conservative Christians, because there aren't going to be enough Jews to do it". Abrams was rehabilitated when George Bush appointed him to the NSC.

Didn't even John Kennedy tell New York Times and New Republic editors that in retrospect, he wished they had refused his request to keep plans for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion from their readers?

It took two years for US deaths to reach 324 in Vietnam. It passed that figure in seven months in Iraq

Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, in a bravura performance emulated by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN last February, announced: "While on routine patrol in international waters, the US destroyer Maddox underwent an unprovoked attack." The only phrase corresponding to reality was that the Maddox was a destroyer. Otherwise, the routine patrol was in fact an attack on North Vietnam's shore installations. The international waters were really North Vietnam's. And the unprovoked attack was not only provoked, it did not take place at all.



By the way, Mahathir says George Bush was lying (again) when he claimed to have privately upbraided the PM. "All he said was that I regret today to have to use strong words against you," said Bush's anti-Semitic buddy. "He did not rebuke me at all and after that, we were walking practically hand in hand." The image of the President holding hands with Mahathir has yet to inspire much outrage among those currently crowing for Krugman's head. Say one thing for America's right-wing hypocrites: They know how to stick with their own.