SteynOnline - STAGGERING OFF

This time Yeltsin is not merely clinically dead

"The ironies abound. Those members of the Duma who despise Boris Yeltsin for obliterating Russia's glorious communist heritage should at least give him credit for keeping faith with one of the party's most cherished traditions: the custom that the country's leader should, to all intents and purposes, be clinically dead."

"Do you remember Bill Clinton's trip to Moscow in 1998? He and Yeltsin held a joint press conference and halfway through an answer the Russian's battery seemed to wind down - he just stopped talking and closed his eyes. With Clinton, of course, the term 'world stage' was peculiarly literal: he had a fading vaudevillian's desperation to be loved. So, with Yeltsin taking an impromptu nap, Bill couldn't resist the urge to signal to his audience that he at any rate was still among the living; so he did his usual doubling-up with laughter, wiping away mock tears, etc - like Sammy Davis Jr corpsing at a Bob Hope golf anecdote on The Tonight Show."