According to a recent story in the Washington Post, President Bush never stops talking about the yellow sunbeam-pattern rug in his Oval Office, designed, he says, by Laura Bush, whom he asked to come up with something that said "optimistic person".
Not only is everybody from President Vladimir Putin to mere TV reporters asked to admire it, but Bush also proudly points it out to virtual visitors to the Oval Office Tour on the White House website (www.whitehouse.gov). The rug has also gone on virtual tour with the President, who regularly mentions it as a sunny symbol of strategic leadership in speeches to Virginia workers, Kansas college students and Tennessee supporters.
Such a cheerful obsession might suggest anything from trademark American optimism to a dangerously high level of Prozac in the White House water-cooler. But consider, for a moment, an even more plausible reason why Bush might be so fixated on his rug: namely, all those things he has managed to sweep under it during the five-and-a-half years of his Presidency. It's hard to believe so much stuff might be hidden under a single carpet, and equally difficult to know where to begin, but let's start by imagining that August 6, 2001 security briefing paper with Osama Bin Laden in its title is lying under there, crumpled up in the dark next to the March 2002 report by Ambassador Joseph Wilson discrediting the claims made by Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union address about Niger uranium reputedly sold to Iraq. Who knows, maybe the recommendation by shortly-to-be-retired US Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki in February 2003 that 300,000 US soldiers would be needed to properly occupy Iraq is under there too, rolled up inside that ill-judged "Mission Accomplished" banner from Bush's Top Gun photo-opportunity aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003.
Once you start, it's difficult to stop imagining what else Bush might have swept out of sight, along with the cookie crumbs, beneath that sunbeam mat. Like the mounting US casualty figures of 2,320 soldiers killed and 16,653 wounded in Iraq? Or the body counts which the US military doesn't do of Iraqi deaths, whose estimated numbers range anywhere from 35,000 to 125,000? Or the balance sheet that shows the $350 billion already spent on that tragically misbegotten war? It could be, of course, more mundane stuff hidden under there with the dust bunnies that has the President obsessing about his rug. You know, like the detailed advance warning about Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans levees, or the latest chilling reports on our accelerated global warming. Or maybe it's just all those boring numbers, such as a US trade deficit of $725 billion and a national debt of $8.3 trillion. Or possibly the shredded pieces of that pesky little federal statute that most constitutional legal experts believe outlaws his administration's current practice of listening in on domestic telephone conversations without a warrant.
Bertie Ahern missed his chance, after handing over that bowl of shamrock, to peek under that same carpet and see if he could find exactly why the same CIA-registered planes that ferry kidnapped terrorist suspects to other torture-friendly regimes have been touching down in Shannon. The rest of us won't get that kind of opportunity to see what lies beneath, but the fact is, we would arguably do better to worry instead about what is currently lying, in plain view, on Bush's desk. In a word, Iran.
It seems madness that an administration already sinking in the bloody mire of one misconceived war would contemplate yet another heedless military action, but the signs are that the US is seriously thinking about mounting a series of major air strikes on Iran's nuclear research facilities. What's more, those signs look like an exact replay of the lead-up to the war on Iraq.
A policy paper is issued targeting Iran, after which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labels Iran as the greatest threat to US security, and UN Ambassador John Bolton announces the US has nothing to talk about with Iran, even as the US accepts Teheran's offer of talks. And, sure enough, next up are the first reports of Iran's alleged collaboration with the al-Qaeda leadership - based, we are told, on highly classified satellite feeds - even though such a strategic alliance flies in the face of the respective Shia/Sunni make-up of Iran and al-Qaeda.
I would love to think my fellow Americans won't be fooled again, just as we sang back in the Sixties, long before our messianic, militarist president cornered the world market on optimism. But I'm not at all sure the war drums now beginning to beat on Iran won't prove to be déjà vu all over again. While 70 per cent of Americans now feel what the rest of the world knew back in 2003 - that war on Iraq was a mistake - nearly as many people marched in Dublin as bothered to turn out in New York city to protest on the third anniversary of the invasion, and the largely hapless Congressional Democrats have yet to figure out how to oppose the war they already bought, whatever about a second one in the making.
That said, millions of grass-roots Americans are likely to mobilise around Congressional elections later this year - elections that offer another chance to pull the rug out from under this disastrous US administration.