sisyphusshrugged | laugh clown laugh

Rush "law enforcement officers with probable cause and a warrant looking at my medical records is a massive human rights violation" Limbaugh on recent events in Abu Ghraib prison

Senator Kennedy, ladies and gentlemen, said that he didn't need to look at any of these other [Iraq prison] pictures. He can just have Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi act them out for him. I'm making that up. It's a joke.

See, I'm going to have to add torture and rape to abortion on the list of things that I really didn't know anyone thought were funny until recent internet encounters en droit learned me different.

'Yet hath a fool a laugh'--Yea, of a sort;
God careth for the fools;
The chemic tools
Of laughter He hath given them, and some toys
Of sense, as 'twere a small retort
Wherein they may collect the joys
Of natural giggling, as becomes their state:
The fool is not inhuman, making sport
For such as would not gladly be without
That old familiar noise:
Since, though he laugh not, he can cachinnate--
This also is of God, we may not doubt.
'Is there an empty laugh?' Best called a shell
From which a laugh has flown,
A mask, a well
That hath no water of its own,
Part echo of a groan,
Which, if it hide a cheat,
Is a base counterfeit;
But if one borrow
A cloak to wrap a sorrow
That it may pass unknown,
Then can it not be empty. God doth dwell
Behind the feigned gladness,
Inhabiting a sacred core of sadness.

'Yet is there not an evil laugh?' Content--
What follows?
When Satan fills the hollows
Of his bolt-riven heart
With spasms of unrest,
And calls it laughter; if it give relief
To his great grief,
Grudge not the dreadful jest.
But if the laugh be aimed
At any good thing that it be ashamed,
And blush thereafter,
Then it is evil, and it is not laughter.