What the thing from the fantastic four might look like if he made poopy-pants face.

Hosni Mubarak. Chris Lee resigned within three hours of the scandal breaking – that’s fast, and you have wonder what he what else he was hoping to avoid by doing that.  Good ol’ Hosni, on the other hand, thought he’d take his time leaving office. Mind you, Lee is a rookie when it comes to political scandal, while Mubarak is old school.   Not that it helped him in any way – I guess the lesson here is this:  if you’re a corrupt dictator, and your people are so fed up with 30 years of oppression they’ve been rioting in the streets for days – well, chances are they’re not going to give it up and go home just because you say you’re handing over MOST of your power to your top hatchet man and taking a holiday in the country until the next election.   There’s a word for people who think that.

Is it just me, or did qaddafi have the same plastic surgeon as Michael jackson?

Muammar el-Qaddaffi. When you break it down, hubris is a delusion, and you’d be hard pressed to find a world leader more deluded than Muammar.  It takes a rare kind of overconfidence to be the nastiest leader on the block, watching the nasty leaders next door getting taken down, and think “well, I will never allow it here”.    In a strange way, you have to admire the gall: my favorite thing from his televised speech yesterday (apart from the tone-on-tone turban/mufti combo and the brief moment where he entered a fugue state and said nothing) was his line “Muammar Qaddafi is history, resistance, liberty, glory, revolution.”  You know you’re suffering from hubris when you refer to yourself in the third person like Donald Trump.   Chris Nelson must admit it probably isn’t sporting for Chris Nelson to single out Qaddafi, seeing as he’s got the entire anti-social personality cocktail: hubris mixed with one part narcissism and at least two parts megalomania, with the worst fashion sense of any dictator on the planet as a chaser.

Scott Walker. The Wisconsin governor either has huge balls, or rocks in his head.  His state is facing a huge budget shortfall, and to make up the difference he persuades public employees to take a de facto pay cut – a neat trick for any governor, especially a Republican.  Now, most politicians would be running a victory lap, but that’s not how Walker rolls.  He decides public employees must also give up their bargaining rights…forever.   It’s a little like getting someone to agree to loan you 20 bucks, then insisting they give you 20 bucks whenever you want, as often as you want, and they have to do it for the rest of their life.   I’m not the biggest fan of unions, but even I have to admit that’s a shit deal.  Maybe Walker thinks the unions are a bunch of pinko sissies who know how bad it will look for them to put up a fight in a recession. Maybe he thinks he’s a master negotiator, the smoothest governor the cheese state has seen. Maybe he’s just a conservative idealogue whose disdain for unions trumps common sense.   I don’t know.  What I do know is that only someone afflicted by hubris would get exactly what they want and think they deserve more.  Judging from all the protests, Wisconsin’s public employees feel the same way.

what...have...i...done?

Justin Bieber. I will dispense with the ill-advised comments in Rolling Stone – he’s probably just parroting what he heard his mother say.  Instead, I will focus on the haircut, although I probably shouldn’t be writing anything at all  - it’ll only gives more attention to bad art (both in the hair and the music).   The thing is, I can’t figure out the logic of opting for a haircut that makes you look like Rachel Maddow – unless, of course, Biebs thinks he looks good with ANY haircut. Now THAT is hubris. Oh well – I suppose it’s a bit better than a mop top that makes you look like a soccer mom from Burlington.  Word has it Biebs donated his bangs to charity, although he didn’t specify which charity would want such a thing.

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