Did Bush propose to bomb Al Jazeera, or didn’t he? Christopher Hitchens ponders:

A second reason for believing in the authenticity of the memo is that an unnamed spokesman for Blair was quoted in the original story as saying that Bush’s remark was “humorous, not serious.” This is as much as to concede that some such conversation did in fact take place. It is of course not always possible to tell when the president is joking, but another who saw the transcript claimed that he was “deadly serious, as was Blair.”