Capitol comedy

I've always liked Steven Wright. His ability to say the silliest, most outrageous or nonsensical things with a dead straight face is great fun.

But here's someone who could teach him a thing or two about deadpanning.

Washington (AP) - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday he is not ready to conclude that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before U.S. troops invaded to depose Saddam Hussein last year. ...

In a prepared statement, Rumsfeld said he was confident that prewar intelligence, while possibly flawed in some respects, was not manipulated by the administration to justify its war aims.

[snicker]

He also offered a list of "alternative views" about why no banned weapons have been found. Reader's Digest version: "Why haven't we found anything? I have no flaming clue."

[chuckle]

Democrats on the committee reminded Rumsfeld that in September 2002 he said "we know" where weapons of mass destruction are stored in Iraq.

Explaining that remark, Rumsfeld told the panel that he was referring to suspected weapons sites, but he acknowledged that he had made it sound like he was talking about actual weapons.

[guffaw]

Now he's really hitting his stride of absurdity. I mean, of course he was talking about weapons! What the hell sense does it make to talk about "weapons sites" if you don't think there are any weapons there? This is really rich!

The Kay team, known as the Iraqi Survey Group, did confirm one thing, Rumsfeld said: "The intelligence community got it essentially right" with regard to Iraq's ballistic missile programs. It found that Iraq was working on missiles of longer range than was permitted under U.N. sanctions.

[laughter]

Stop it! You're too much! Oh, the subtlety of that one is pure genius. I hope I'm not spoiling the joke, but the missile in question, the Al Samoud 2, technically violated the UN arms control regime because in 13 of 40 test flights it went further than the 150 kilometer limit. In those tests, the missiles had no guidance systems on board, the added weight of which would have shortened the range. And how did the UN know this? The Iraqis told them! And how did the Iraqis respond when Han Blix's team decided it was a violation? They destroyed the missiles! Oh, those deceitful Iraqis.

The findings of the Kay group, he added, so far have "not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated he had and what we believed he had. But it also has not proven the opposite."

Or, as he put it a while ago, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

[gasp]

Oh, I have to get out of here. My sides are hurting....