Celebrate National Sanctity of Life Day . . .

With the brilliant columnist Mark Morford. I suspect he may be the offspring of an illicit liaison between Hunter Thompson and Molly Ivins.

And here we are, once more tied to the rack of the cripplingly painful irony that is Dubya's National Sanctity of Life Day, in case you didn't know and in case you forgot to buy a card or something, and isn't it just the most adorable slap to your karmic consciousness you ever did hear?

Because there's Dubya himself, stammering on from a prepared script clearly written by someone else given all the polysyllabic words, all about cherishing life and protecting the unborn and isn't life just this great fuzzywarm glowing hunk of precious blah blah blah, ad nauseam, hey whoops gotta run folks time to massacre some Iraqis and decimate some forests, smirk.

What, too harsh? Hardly.

Look, just over there, it's Cheney and Rumsfeld, standing just offstage, snickering and shaking their heads at the absurdity of it all, at the hilarious PR, rubbing their hands together and conjuring more oozing war demons from deep within their bowels.

Both giddy with the knowledge that 100,000 more US troops have just been shipped to the Gulf to prepare to kill roughly 500,000 Iraqis and generate roughly 900,000 refugees, with millions more destitute and in need of aid (as estimated by the U.N.'s recent analysis of an Iraq attack called "Likely Humanitarian Scenarios"), the sanctity of whose life, apparently, don't matter in the slightest.

Dubya actually said it. He actually went so far as to pledge his administration's commitment to "build a culture that respects life," saying this with a straight face, no violent lightning bolt striking him dead on the spot, no gnarled filthy hell-beasts reaching with clawed fingers up from the ground and dragging him under, isn't that just the sweetest thing and don't you just feel the sentiment deep in your heart? Or perhaps your colon?

It really is just the kindest, most conservatively compassionate sentiment -- unless of course you happen to be, you know, a foreigner, or an animal, or the environment, or gay or female or non-Christian or anyone who's not really, really white and wealthy and who doesn't know Dubya Sr. personally or who hasn't bootlegged a half-rack of Coors Light from the local Liquor Barn for Jenna.

Do go to the site and read the rest of the column. It's painfully funny, or hilariously agonizing.