This Sunday, famed penumbral prognosticator Punxsutawney Phil poked his furry little head above ground and there saw something so unnerving that he instantly bolted back to his burrow, where he remains today, a profoundly shaken groundhog.

Lord knows, these days there are more than enough looming shadows sufficient to drive the Philster into the deepest recesses of his subterranean cozy, but winter would seem to be one of the least of them.

Not that anyone here at Chez W would deprecate the season. Our respect for winter has grown in direct proportion to our exposure. Eastern weather is a cold comeuppance for those of us recently transplanted from the smug radiance of the Western clime. The locals here swear this is an unseasonable winter, but of course they all receive their instructions directly from the Chamber of Commerce and are therefore lying in their teeth.

Not in doubt however, is the fact that the weather pattern here on our newly adopted coast has been maddeningly random; shifting gears between winter and spring as effortlessly as an over-lubricated Nash Rambler. We live in hopes of a time in which the weather won't vary by more than 50 degrees in any given hour.

For a time we thought the wildly variant weather was causing our Internet connection to lapse into its increasingly frequent comas. But then we learned the problem was caused by something called the "SQL worm" which was giving our computer a severe silicon tummy ache.

There was a sharp divergence of opinion as to the precise meaning of "SQL." One half of your W Team held that it was Latin for "Secundus Quod Locatum" which was loosely construed to mean "Let's get the heck out of here! Let's get the heck out of here right now!"

The rest declared it to be an abbreviation for "Squirrel," meant to characterize the system's odd behavior. This latter explanation found immediate favor because it touched on familiar ground for those of us in the nation's capital, where the unofficial motto is "A squirrel in every tree, a nut for every squirrel."

The squirrel motif has also become more evident in the international press, where foreign journalists and observers have likened our nation's behavior of late to that of the genus Sciuridae, as we dart frantically from tree to tree storing up our missiles for the winter.

Some commentators have taken a broad approach to the issue, as did noted mystery writer, John Le Carré, who in a recent article asks, "Has America Gone Crazy?" Which he then proceeds to answer in terms not favorable to us. Mr. Le Carré is of course British and may therefore be forgiven for much that he says, but he seems to have touched upon a common concern. Others have adopted a narrower focus, expressing their belief that the Commodore of our ship of state has slipped his rudder.

So rife has such speculation become that some of our allies, notably Germany and Canada (no, not France, we said "allies") have felt compelled to speak out on Mr. Bush's behalf. Most recently both German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien have sought to assure the world that the President is not a moron. "He is not a moron," is how they put it. And these are men who have attended NATO conferences, so they know what they're talking about.

But those who hold the opposite view can be forgiven. It is an easy mistake to make. The leader of the 100% guaranteed, inevitable and you-betcha war that we may or may not (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) have with Iraq is a man of consummate skill in the belligerent arts, but one whose unconventional tactics might easily lead the unwary and uninformed to the mistaken conclusion that he is total whack.

One must step back a few paces fully to appreciate the labyrinthine subtlety that typifies our latter day Sun Tzu.

For example, as everyone knows, surprise is one of the most effective elements of warfare. What could be more surprising than to launch an all-out attack against a nation that didn't even know it was at war with you? Moreover, one that had no possible hope of defending itself?

The thing that separates this President from all others is that he is not content to wait around until an enemy poses a threat, he is ready to go to war long before there is even the remotest possibility of that happening. In so doing he cleverly anticipates a decision that the leaders of the suspect nation did not even know they were making. His motto: strike while the iron is warm!

This tactic has become necessary because Saddam Hussein has turned out to be just one huge disappointment and one of the least cooperative enemies we've ever had. By now, any other self-respecting villain would have produced at least one decent doomsday weapon.

Well, we're not going to let him get away with having no weapons. Our President has read "Alice in Wonderland" enough times to know that an un-birthday is even more important than the real one because it can be celebrated more often. And it is but a short hop from there to the conclusion that for every Weapon of Mass Destruction not found there may be hundreds, even thousands of un-weapons of Mass Destruction--an arsenal more than sufficient to blow up the entire planet!

As the President recently said: "The only possible explanation for [Saddam's] efforts to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons is to dominate, intimidate, or attack." Well, heck, that's certainly our reason, and we give Saddam credit for it being his as well.

There was, it is true, a brief setback when, having failed to find any weapons to speak of, the President was forced to fall back on the discovery of mysterious aluminum tubes supposedly imported for nuclear research. The subsequent finding that the tubes were, as Iraqi officials had long maintained, intended solely for use in conventional weapons, briefly tarnished our street-cred and seriously ticked-off Secretary of the Apocalypse Donald Rumsfeld.

But then inspectors discovered a cache of munitions, all of them arrogantly bearing the blatant inscription "4th of July," apparently a hitherto unknown terrorist group with possible links to the Al Quaeda. When opened, the crates were found to contain so-called "sparklers," incendiary devices that are rich in toxic magnesium and that can be detonated with an ordinary kitchen match. They also found hundreds of the feared explosives known as "firecrackers," so lethal they have been banned in nearly all states of this union.

Munitions experts theorize that either of these devices might easily put someone's eye out.

Still think we're crazy, Europe? No, we didn't think so.

Obviously, realizing that Iraq is a threat not just to America, but to the whole world doesn't require a great deal of intelligence. In fact, it requires none at all.

So we're not crazy, we're just angry; and, as the famous Roman poet said more than twenty centuries ago, "Anger is a brief lunacy."

But of course that was a Horace of a different choler.

 

Cheers,

Hank