Grandiose George

President G.W. Bush tells today's 'Observer' that part of his historical legacy will be "the liberation of 50 million people from the clutches of barbaric regimes".

He doesn't reveal who or where all of those 50 lucky millions are, and he conveniently forgets to mention that the drastic curtailment of 300 million U.S. citizens' historic civil liberties since 2001 has been an accidental - or maybe intentional - by-product of his gung-ho foreign policy.

One's only response to such a preposterous claim has to be the Duke of Wellington's celebrated "If you believe that, you'll believe anything". The Iron Duke was wearily familiar with the bombastic boastings of inflated egos - he had to put up with that vaingloriously delusional monarch George IV describing, in vivid detail, how he had led one of the charges at the Battle of Waterloo, although he was in fact on the other side of the Channel at the time. As Dr Stephen Parissien puts it here, "that the decaying King should in his dotage begin to believe that he had played a key role at the Battle of Waterloo itself was, given his daily consumption of prodigious amounts of drugs and and of cherry brandy, a predictable progression."

Whatever the now teetotal Dubya does or doesn't consume, clearly he is as suffused with mentally addled vaingloriousness as was his royal namesake.