Well I never . . .

Is it possible there has been a massive shift in the zeitgeist? Last night I channel surfed to Hardball and got stuck there for a while. Tweety and Mrs. Alan Greenspan, of all people, were skating right up to the ultimate TV taboo -- not any of the seven words you can't say, but the one word you absolutely, positively, cannot apply to George W. Bush, and that is of course the L word.

In the greatest ice dance since Torvill and Dean, they showed clips of Chimpy chattering and then opined to the effect that "That just isn't true," or "It simply isn't credible," and even went so far as to tell us all the actual, real, valid, reliable, factual, concrete truth -- the stuff that happened, not the stuff that Republican politicians said happened. They still couldn't say the Simian-in-Chief was lying, that's still illegal, but even though they couldn't use the word, they wanted us to know what they were thinking.

And that's not all. Tweety was really, really pissed. He was hurt. It seems that he really believed all that crap about World War Three and he felt profoundly betrayed.

And then it got even better. Jellyfish Joe Biden came on and -- mirabile dictu! -- Jellyfish Joe has decided to join the phylum Chordata. I'm still going to call him Notochord Joe because he has a way to go to earn full credit for a vertebral column, but he's definitely no longer 100% soft tissue. He couldn't say the L word either but he did say something about misleading the public. And then Tweety asked him why the neocons invaded Iraq and why they wanted war with Iran.

Joe said it! He named that which shall not be named! He said that the underlying motive was to acquire permanent bases from which to dominate militarily the petroleum resources of the Middle East. Yes he did. (Tweety and Mrs. G. had been unable to even imagine such a thing -- they were musing about Iranian sponsorship for terrorism and stuff.) After I picked my teeth up off the floor, Senator Notochord made a vague promise to the effect that we would indeed see the so far censored portion of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Iraq war. And to top it off, he said that if Bush attacked Iran without congressional authorization, he'd call for impeachment.

Of course, nobody watches MSNBC and we all know what was going on over at Rupert Murdoch's RNC channel. Still, this was like waking up in a parallel universe.

PS: Then there's the question of what's really going on here. For months all we've been hearing is that the NIE was not going to be declassified and then suddenly, POW, right in the simian kisser. My guess? A mutiny by the military leadership, possibly with the concurrence of Sec. Gates. Declassify the NIE findings, or we resign and spill the beans. Now that's news.