Dead fish twitching

You must read "Simon Hoggart's sketch" in today's Guardian.

Some gems:

• The president looked like a hooked fish with its head hammered by a humane angler. But he always does. Yesterday he looked even worse. He has moved from the riverbank to the fishmonger's slab. After the midterms and the Baker report on Iraq (executive summary: "We screwed up. Now let's get out"), he has been called a dead man walking. Yesterday he resembled a dead fish twitching.
  
  
• At the best of times - and these are not the best of times - Bush finds it hard to find the right words, so he thrashes about in the hope that some will pop into his head, like wasps into a jam jar. (At one point he called the sectarian attacks in Iraq "unsettling". It's a word, I suppose.)


• His replies grew longer. We were not listening to a coherent argument - instead we were floating down Dubya's stream of consciousness, hitting a rock, bashing into overhanging branches.


• Asked if he could admit he was wrong, he began a meandering reply. "I do know we have not succeeded as fast as we hoped. I know that progress has not been so rapid ... I am disappointed by the pace of success."
  
  Alongside Hirohito's concession after Hiroshima - "the war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" - we can now add another majestic euphemism, "disappointed by the pace of success".

Ouch.

No wonder Bush got mad at the British press.