Irony is officially dead.

I am not making this up:

Islamic extremists seek to "enslave whole nations" in a bid for global domination, U.S. President George W. Bush warned yesterday, explicitly raising the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin, as well as Soviet communism's nuclear arsenal, capable of extinguishing human civilization.

"The civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history -- from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot -- consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.

"Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply," Mr. Bush told a receptive audience at the National Endowment for Democracy, a mostly government-funded organization working to sow Western-style democracy around the world.

At which point several members of the audience spontaneously exploded from cynical disbelief.