A failed leader who has held his subjects captive despite pissing away huge financial surpluses on large-scale failures and squandering copious international support has, after an agonizing turn at the helm, finally agreed to step down. A man whose underhanded and paranoid machinations have laid waste to friend and foe alike while casting a blight on the hapless multitudes in his charge. And though the end is within grasp, we are left somehow unsatisfied that the ulcerated tissue coughed up from our bilious state is Michael Eisner rather than the President himself.

Not resting on its laurels, the Bush-Halliburton administration now proposes siphoning $3 billion set aside for Iraqi reconstruction projects like water and power in an attempt to bolster Baghdad’s feckless security apparatus. Well it’s about time the White House took money away from Iraqis instead of from us Americans. We’ve been closing down fire stations and packing our kids into overcrowded classrooms long enough. One U.S. official confided that the funds could put an additional 40,000 Iraqi policemen on the street, but I guess after Tuesday’s car bomb and minivan ambush, they’re looking for more like 40,070.

What I still can’t figure out, though, is why Bush continues to insist that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that North Korea doesn’t. Not a “nuclear event,” chirped Condoleezza Rice after a massive explosion near the Chinese border sent up a mushroom cloud large enough to be visible from outer space. Secretary of State Colin Powell said there were “some activities taking place and some sites that we’re watching carefully, but it is not conclusive that they are moving toward a [nuclear] test.” This mysterious episode follows a nearby April blast that killed 3,000 people when – ostensibly – a train laden with chemicals and oil slammed into power lines. This time Pyongyang had a different explanation: North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun declared, “it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a nuclear explosion; it was a deliberate detonation of a mountain as part of a reclamation project to accommodate a new Wal-Mart.” Ever suspicious, Rice mused publicly, “Maybe it was a fire — some kind of forest fire.”

Dick Cheney, for one, has been tirelessly fanning the flames of terror, telling voters in Iowa, “It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” Blowing smoke up a reporter’s ass the following day, Cheney clarified, “I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack, what I said was… uh… Oh, go fuck yourself!”

It is arguable, at least, that we are actually more vulnerable with W. at he reins: he opposed creating the Department of Homeland Security, he tried to obviate the 9/11 commission by blocking testimony and withholding documentation and, in the main, he attacked the wrong damn country. Senator Bob Graham voted against the 2002 resolution to authorize the use of force against Iraq, arguing that international terrorist networks – including al Qaeda – pose a greater threat to Americans than Saddam Hussein. The Senator is still carping that we haven’t captured Bin Laden and cites a lack of focus and effort in Afghanistan. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Car bombs and assassinations are rife in both countries. Prisoner abuse, to cite another example, has not been confined to Abu Ghraib. Why just yesterday in Kabul three covert American operatives were convicted of torturing Afghan detainees and were sentenced to 10 years behind bars wearing nothing but electrified barbed-wire jock straps and crude rectal inserts.

Which will probably be less pleasant if equally demeaning than a day the DMV, or even an average trip through the airport. Though it might be a hard sell to the thousands of flyers grounded when some idiot at the FAA’s Traffic Control Center in Palmdale forgot to put batteries in his radio. Airliners, running out of fuel, were haphazardly stacked on runways in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and as far away as Seattle and Phoenix. Spokesperson Laura Brown quipped that the four-hour snafu could have been much worse if not for US Air’s second bankruptcy and Delta’s enormous cutbacks. “There are fewer planes nowadays,” she allowed. In an attempt to stay afloat, Delta is terminating between 6,000 and 7,000 employees, shuttering their Dallas hub and paring down the number of routes plied. But none of this will help – retiring pilots are sucking every last (pension) dollar out of the company – and the Atlanta-based carrier should be in Chapter 11 by Christmas.