[ "Open Mike" is the anything-goes Opinion page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. blows steam off the top of his head. It normally appears on Wednesdays.] - It's snowing and below freezing here right now. Making me anxious about the health of the delicate blooming plants hereabouts. This is the view through my kitchen window about 80 seconds ago, snapped with the phone and AirDrop'd on to the computer. Monkeys I have a sensitivity to a thing I call "American Irony." The examples just pelt me like there's a monkey nearby enthusiastically flinging his dung about, occasionally smiting me on the cheek with a fat wet lump. Example: terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. In response, Bush the Lesser declares "the" War on Terror. To me, this immediately telegraphed that his government intended to use the event as a pretext to do whatever it wanted to. (The salient result of the "War on Terror" was the establishment of a dozen permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil, to enforce the flow of Iraqi oil to the U.S. Everything else about it was gaslight. As ably explained by one of the original founders of movement conservatism who later went renegade, Kevin Phillips.) I went around at the time pointing out that it's meaningless in any normal sense to "declare war" on a