Robert Fisk, who’s becoming a one-man Idiotarian News Service, weighs in on Colin Powell’s speech to the Security Council—and basically accuses him of lying: You wanted to believe him – but it was like something out of Beckett.

Sources, foreign intelligence sources, “our sources,” defectors, sources, sources, sources. Colin Powell’s terror talk to the United Nations Security Council yesterday sounded like one of those government-inspired reports on the front page of The New York Times – where it will most certainly be treated with due reverence in this morning’s edition. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Haven’t we heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man? General Powell, I mean, not Saddam.

Before you gasp, “He just said he trusts Saddam more than Colin!”—old Fiskie is way ahead of you. He knew you’d gasp, and so immediately covers his butt:

Certainly we don’t trust Saddam but Secretary of State Powell’s presentation was a mixture of awesomely funny recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone intercepts à la Samuel Beckett that just might have been some terrifying little proof that Saddam really is conning the UN inspectors again, and some ancient material on the Monster of Baghdad’s all too well known record of beastliness.

This pretty much sums up the pseudo-sophisticated, overbearingly snarky tone of Fiskie’s latest pile of steaming effluvia. I’d continue fisking, but life is short.

If you need more evidence of Fisk’s pathetic derangement, though, here’s an account of a recent speech he gave at Harvard, in which he repeats the long-debunked, totally ridiculous Iraqi propaganda claim that depleted uranium left over from the first Gulf War has caused an “epidemic of cancer” in Iraq: Renowned Journalist Criticizes The Media.

What a buffoon.