So let's see, the Prime Minister is a six-foot-five terrorist with a penchant for making poorly lit videos, the Leader of the Opposition is actually the Grand Dragon of a white supremacist organization that favours pinstripes over bedsheets, and the Devil is a pint-sized exercise freak with the charisma of Dudley Do-Right on happy pills.

Yes, the apocalypse is nigh on Parliament Hill, though no one has seen fit to include Gilles Duceppe as the fourth horseman...give it a week.

Acting like a bunch of sugar-crazed schoolchildren bent on setting new standards for potty humour and hair pulling, the folks entrusted with the care of the nation, from elected MPs to trusted aides, began hurling insults at one another like there was no tomorrow, or so it must seem to jittery parliamentarians scared of losing their seats and pensions within the month.

First there was Stephen Harper painting the ever-congenial and suddenly relevant Jack Layton as a fiscal Beelzebub of the first order. Then Tory strategist Geoff Norquay followed with the suggestion that Paul Martin was a two-bit Bin Laden, pleading for his job "from the cave." Not to be outdone, Immigration Minister Joe Volpe raised (or lowered, depending on your moral point of view) the parliamentary bar still further by quipping that the Conservative Party was nothing more than the Klan save for hoods and capes. And the latter was a knee-jerk and ill-considered reaction to an equally tasteless bit of fun by Conservative MPs Lee Richardson and Werner Schmidt, who laughed it up while posing with the cover of the Western Standard's take on the Liberal Party.

Not that "The Liberano$" wasn't fun, mind you, with a family photo of all your favourite Liberals making like Tony Soprano and the gang, but these are supposedly highly paid professionals. Would you want your doctor doing impressions of a martini-addled Hawkeye Pierce in the middle of your kidney operation?

And to add just that extra bit of spice to a week that many, including a clearly disgusted Ed Broadbent, would sooner forget, Treasury Board President Reg Alcock mused about Conservative MP Inky Mark's genetic suitability for ambassadorship. Of course, there were apologies all around, including this priceless piece of drivel from Joe "civil rights crusader" Volpe when he opined that his comments only "helped further erode the civility that once characterized debate in the House of Commons."

That's a bit like suggesting too much litter will sully a garbage dump.

While catching a late-night replay of the day's Commons debate is always good for a laugh, with well-educated, well-connected, supposedly eloquent overseers of the country's affairs flailing away at each other like a sack of cats in heat, one has to wonder whether we could just hire some actors to continue the soap opera and send the rest packing. I've seen better manners after last call at my local pub, and that from a collection of thoroughly soused combatants who have never heard of Upper Canada College, much less had the privilege of being groomed there for high office. So I can't see it being much of a challenge for actors.

My only explanation is that politicians are a congregation of failed comedians who think their sophomoric attempts at one-liners are somehow clever and captivating. It might explain the sad sight of Carolyn Parrish and her fifteen seconds of fame on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, stomping on a George Bush doll while doing more to embarrass us than garner a laugh, and making the hard-working folks at Yuk Yuks wonder why they haven't taken a flier on running for office or handling PR for our most esteemed political parties.

Do these people go home at night, pound their fists on the table, interrupt family members and heckle dinner guests? Were they encouraged as children to hoot and holler like drunken frat boys, to taunt people in public and employ the sort of etiquette normally displayed by agitated Rhesus Monkeys? Is all you really need to succeed a shoddy sense of rhetoric and insult?

Well, I can do a lot better than compare Paul Martin to Osama Bin Laden, or to Genghis Khan, for that matter, as now-Liberal Scott Brison dubbed Paul Martin a few years back. So if that's all it takes, look out Canada, because I'm going to be your next Prime Minister.