KEY POINTS:
There was blood on the stock exchange floor but otherwise the world reacted calmly to the news that George W. Bush's brain had left the building.
That partly reflected the widespread scepticism that such an organ exists. This week a fellow columnist correctly observed that it would be hard to find a better example of oxymoron than "good hummus". Some would argue that George W. Bush's brain is even more oxymoronic.
The brain in question actually belongs to Karl Rove, Bush's owlish eminence grise. In the wake of Rove's departure from the White House, pundits sagely declared that Bush was now a lame duck.
One would have thought that was axiomatic given he's less popular than irritable bowel syndrome. More pertinent is their assumption that now his domestic agenda is dead in the water, Bush will devote what's left of his presidency to foreign affairs.
Hands up all those who think that what the world needs now is more Bush.
I've never really bought the idea that Bush is brainless. He is, however, a small-town Texan, and what strikes men and women of the world as hayseed behaviour might well pass for worldliness in Crawford, McLennan County, West Texas (pop: 789). McLennan's county seat, incidentally, is Waco.
I tend to see him as another in the long line of American leaders whose interaction with the outside world is largely driven by ignorance (as opposed to stupidity), naivete, and perhaps most dangerous of all, optimism.
It's this terrifying optimism that causes successive American administrations to believe that problems can and should be solved once and for all, rather than contained or politely ignored - as per the philosophy of benign neglect practised by the British Foreign Office when the sun never set on the empire.
US presidents also have a tendency to allow their religious beliefs to cloud the policy and decision-making process, in the conviction that America has God on its side.
No presidential address is complete without the plea - although it often sounds like an order - "God bless America". America is blessed in many respects but you'd have to say that God didn't appear to take sides in the Vietnam War and is conspicuous by his absence in Iraq.
A casual survey of recent occupants of the White House bears out the premise that when it comes to deciding whether someone has what it takes to be president, the American people set more store by things like his wife, his hair, his teeth, and his dog than by his brain.
It was said of Gerald Ford - a baldie, admittedly, but a president by default rather than popular choice - that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Jimmy Carter might have been a peanut farmer from the Deep South but he had a dog named Grits, a full head of hair, and one of the toothiest grins known to orthodontics.
Ronald Reagan was a former actor - his best-remembered role was that of a professor who tries to teach a chimpanzee the difference between right and wrong in the 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo - whose hair was still mysteriously profuse and glossy when he left the White House aged 77.
George Bush senior managed what in hindsight was the quite extraordinary feat of uniting international opinion around military action against Iraq, liberating Kuwait and defeating Saddam Hussein, resisting the temptation - and much advice - to invade and occupy Iraq, and getting kicked out of office.
While a Rhodes Scholar and political virtuoso, Bill Clinton preferred to do most of his thinking with another part of his anatomy.
Not exactly the Mensa Society but at least the White House has been a madness-free zone since the final days of the Nixon Administration when the disgraced President was prone to trying to engage a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in conversation.
That may be about to change: the front-runner for the Republican nomination is Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.
On the face of it, Giuliani is an interesting and worthy candidate: the man who cleaned up Gotham City, the hero of 9/11, and that rarest of creatures, a Republican who happens to be a social liberal.
But according to a Vanity Fair article, many long-time observers are convinced that Giuliani's insane.
A reasonably impressive body of evidence is marshalled in support of this contention, including his response to a ferret owner who called his weekly radio show to protest about the city's ban on them as pets: "There's something deranged about you. This excessive concern for little weasels is a sickness you should examine with a therapist." Et cetera, ad nauseam.
We shouldn't worry just yet, though. I doubt that America's ready for a bald president, even if he has abandoned the comb-over.
