With each passing day, the US slides further into some dark farce that would have us rolling in the aisles with laughter if the consequences weren't so monstrous and bloody.

Good poker players know when to fold 'em. But there are no good poker players in Washington. Not among the incompetents in the Bush administration. Not among the Republican dunderheads who control both houses of Congress and very few among the so-called opposition -- a.k.a. Democrats.

It's bad enough when the imbecilic Decider in Chief makes a fool of himself, as he did this week in Vienna. First, by making like a "girlie-man" by stomping his feet and telling Iran not to test his patience over its perfectly legal nuclear program. Who in hell does he think he is? Oops, he's the Decider.

Then Decider Bush stupidly says it's "absurd" for Europeans to suggest that the US is the greatest threat to world stability. Right, just don't glance over at the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And, in all his infantile insolence, he couldn't resist lashing out at the third leg of his "axis of evil," the North Korean, warning them if they test fired their long-range missile, he would pick up his joystick and launch his (non-existent) missile defense whatevers to shoot them down.

Then he goes to Hungary and tells the Iraqis they should be inspired by the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, which the Soviets crushed in 12 days. It only took the Hungarians 33 more years to rid themselves of tyranny. Some inspiration for the Iraqis or was Bush telling them they would be under Corporate America's boot for three more decades?

Meanwhile back in Washington, the GOP leadership in the House and Senate, taking their orders from the Decider and his controller, Dark Side Cheney -- and armed with the Pentagon's illegal political talking points -- instead of folding 'em on Iraq, buckled under and decreed the Republicans would "stay the course."

Never mind that the majority of Americans want us to leave. Never mind that the majority of Iraqis want us to leave. Never mind that US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, former Unocal adviser and our current puppet in Iraq, is busy having documents shredded in preparation for the Green Zone being overrun by the Iraqi resistance, which the Bushies and the corporate media insist upon calling "insurgents."

Despite all the nonsense about the gains being made in Iraq that is spewed daily by the administration and dutifully reported by the corporate media, plus Cheney's repeated pronouncements that the "insurgency" is in its "last throes," Khalilzad's leaked confidential memo paints a grim picture of the stark reality that life in Iraq worsens daily.

But Khalilzad's revelations are meaningless to the congressional Republicans who reject the wimpy Democrats paltry proposals for withdrawal and accuse them of being "defeatists" who want to "cut and run."

Now why do you suppose the Republicans, who claim to be so worried that the Democrats will retake Congress in November, think that continuing the killing of Americans and Iraqis is their key to victory? Because their worries are a sham; they make cheap for copy to fill the spaces between the ads in newspapers and the commercials on so-called TV and radio "news." It's all a game, a sick, sick game that can't get much sicker.

The Republicans control the easily rigged touch screens and optical scanners most Americans will use to cast their votes on.

The GOP is utterly contemptuous of the American people and what the people thought was their democratic republic. And the Democrats are not much better. Do American have to have feces rubbed in their faces before they grasp what is going on?