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How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to replace a light bulb?
The Answer is SEVEN:
- One to deny that a light bulb needs to be replaced...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Prologue to The Multiple Abyss by James Cumes
Those of us, in the Western democracies, who grew up in the Great Depression knew a world in which almost all of us were poor and our future uncertain. We dreamed of a prosperity we were told was just around the corner; but the good times remained a dream while the threat of war became ever more real. Most of us left school early to grab what jobs we could; and even the few who went to university knew that they might soon have to abandon their studies to go to war. If we managed, miraculously, to escape both poverty and war, we were still plagued by a variety of fatal, painful and chronic diseases for which we had no remedies and we lived in environments of which we took little care. We sang such songs as Happy Days are Here Again to keep our spirits up. The movie theatre was our Camelot of fantasy and escape.
Shortly after Pearl Harbour, while still in my teens, I did indeed go off to war. At that point, nazism, fascism and militarism seemed triumphant. Hitler stood at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad and his General Rommel looked set to walk into Cairo. The Japanese spread themselves effortlessly over east and south-east Asia and the Pacific, as far west as Burma and as far south as New Guinea. Even if we should manage to turn the tide, the prospect was for ever more death and devastation and, unless we were lucky, a new and even deeper economic depression when the shooting stopped.
So, in many ways, it seemed we could only despair; but some more positive features live in my memory. Since we were almost all poor, poverty was often less a badge of shame than a mark of fellowship; and, in our innocence, we had our moral as well as our social and economic disciplines. Always, we had our dreams.
In March 1942, when I swapped university for the army, my parting editorial in our students' newspaper was politically correct in its title of Pro Patria and forward-looking in reminding students that Words are things and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew upon a thought, Produces that which makes thousands, Perhaps millions, think.
That was one of the clearest measures of the character of our times. Our duty was not only to prevail in battle but to think about what we aspired to in the future
· Like Ulysses, we called upon ourselves not only to endure but also to seek, to strive and not to yield and, above all, to think and to plan [ via VOW ]
· My Life: Bill Clinton
· See Also American Viewed by Europe, Europe Viewed by America