I took a break from watching Danny Kaye in the Court Jester (“The chalice from the palace holds the brew that is true”) to watch our own court commander on Sunday night. He was not so much in a jesting mood; between trying to talk tough about the Patriotic Act and his decision to spy on Americans without oversight from the courts and his insistence that everything was going great in Iraq, he didn’t have much time to make with the jokes.

Not that he doesn’t like them. Witness his bizarre double-take at the press conference the next day when he said that in most democracies people find out who won the election the next day. Ooops! Don’t want to remind people of the Florida fiasco. Then there was that funny business with his executive order forbidding two-part questions, and how about the face he made when the door wouldn’t open in China last month? It would have been really funny if he had walked through it and never come back. But then the Chinese would have a lot of explaining to do.

No, these days GWB can’t kid with the public. He has to sound tough about spying on our citizens and he takes on the air of one telling fairy stories when talking about Iraq. But he does not sound wise and paternal; his manner is glib and perfunctory, not like your dad but like your babysitter’s skeezy boyfriend who is reading a story to you while nursing a beer and hoping you go to sleep, pronto, so he can mess around. Makes you want to stay awake to see what kind of shit he’s going to try. Suspicious, but not funny.

Danny Kaye, he was funny.