Always nice to laugh

The thing about a good joke (such as Molly Ivins's line about how a Patrick Buchanan speech wasn't very good but we should cut him some slack because "it probably sounded much better in the original German") is that it can give you pleasure whether you agree with the politics or not. I happen to agree with the Hatemongers' politics more often than not, and certainly it's all but a moral necessity to make merciless mock of any feeble-headed magazine that thinks Paul Wolfowitz might be, in the words of this New Statesman headline, "the worst man in the world." And I think there's a very serious political point to be made; I think there are a lot of Americans who, like me, have a pretty bloody low opinion of the Shrub, but who, like me, are appalled and disgusted and repelled by the Howard Dean / Kossack conviction that the Shrub is the one true enemy of America.

But what was it that knocked me off my chair in guffaws halfway through this HQ rant? Why, obviously, it was the presence in this list of...one of my favorite actors:

Last we checked, the following people still inhabit what R. Buckminster Fuller labeled Our Spaceship Earth: Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden, Gérard Depardieu. And then there’s the likes of Hamas, Bashir Assad, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Tamil Tigers (and the Detroit Lions), &c.

Which made me do two things: (a) laugh immoderately and (b) think to myself, "It's been entirely too long since I've watched the Depardieu Cyrano."

A nice kicker of a closer, too:

For its patent imbecility, we feel as if the New Statesman deserves the “worst magazine in the world” award. Perhaps the real worst person in the world can thumb through it. We refer, of course, to Keith Olberman.