"What do you mean ... THAT computer?"

There's a clever Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert's one-time girlfriend Liz, watching him working at his home desktop computer, says to him, "You love that computer more than you love me." To which Dilbert replies adamantly as Liz walks away, "No, I do not love this computer more than I love you," while you can see the thought bubble above Dilbert's head: "Don't ask about the laptop ... don't ask about the laptop ..." Pregnant pause, then a disembodied voice coming in from off-panel, "What do you mean ... that computer?"

We all, of course, know just what happened here: Dilbert tried to salvage the situation by parsing Liz's question as carefully and selectively as possible and hoping she didn't notice. It's sort of like pounding the table and insisting, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman!", while thinking, "Please, oh, please, please, please, don't ask about blowjobs." And, mostly, it's sort of like criticizing people for talking about detainee abuse at Gitmo when, hey, we all know that that all really happened at Abu Ghraib instead.

As you can read at the link above, one Jeff Goldstein waxes apoplectic about how the left is really responsible for the deaths by a suicide bomber because that bomber expressed the "need for violent retaliation over US abuse of Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay" when, geez, all that bad stuff really happened at Abu Ghraib and there was (according to Goldstein) no evidence of any of that happening at Gitmo because, hey, David Horowitz' web site said so, but that didn't stop all those lefties from saying it did so it's all the left's fault and (thought bubble time), by the way, it's a good thing that suicide bomber said "Guantanamo Bay" instead of "Abu Ghraib" 'cuz if he'd said "Abu Ghraib", well, we'd all be totally fucked in terms of a rhetorical comeback but, as it is, we can carry on as smugly and condescendingly as usual and yammer on very explicitly and selectively only about "Guantanamo Bay" and hope no one notices.

It's quite the sight, isn't it? After all this time, it appears that the lifelong dream of the ideological right is to be Bill Clinton.

Is that irony or what?