Who's on first?

If you thought presidential politics had become so absurdly surrealistic that you had to laugh in order not to cry (or run screaming in terror), you might not have been far off the mark:

They're separated by more than 20 years, they come from opposing political parties, and one evicted the other from the White House. But Bill Clinton and George Bush act like a team, a pair of touring comedians with a well-honed act.

The two former presidents even have their entrance down pat, striding in with arms aloft, music pounding, lights flashing, the crowd standing and going wild.

Bush 41 and Clinton were exactly the same kind of president -- people who had been aiming for the job their whole lives and saw it as the next logical step on their resumes. Once they got the office, they didn't have any particular philosophy to apply to it. So naturally they can laugh about it now -- they were just tap-dancing through one more gig, not being the leader of the free world or anything.

The sad thing is that the wife of one of these comedians is poised to become the next Democratic presidential nominee, and the son of the other is welcoming his father's foreign-policy "pragmatists" into the White House. Laugh, clown, laugh.

(Today's quiz: Only 42 men have occupied the White House, but George W. Bush is rightly called the nation's 43rd president. Why is that? If nobody gets the answer, remind me in a couple of days, and I'll tell you.)