Doh! The news as delivered by Homer Simpson

Sometimes, you read or hear something on the news that’s so silly it seems like a joke. But you go back over it again, and it was indeed supposed to be serious. For example:

The presidential candidates recently released another round of fundraising reports. GOP Sen. John McCain said the amount of cash he brought in really wasn’t important.

“If money mattered, I think (Nelson) Rockefeller would have been president,” he said.

Gee, let’s figure this one out. There are two kinds of candidate reactions to these reports:

A) This group is delighted at how much it raked in and crowing about its success.

B) This one is embarrassed at how much it collected and coming up with excuses.

If you don’t know which group McCain belongs to after that comment, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Then there’s the continuing soap opera with former NFL star Ricky Williams.

Ricky is taking a temporary vacation from the NFL due to some legal difficulties. But he has applied for reinstatement, and his agent is optimistic.

In fact, agent Leigh Steinberg went so far as to say, “Ricky is extremely excited about the prospect of playing in the NFL again and hopeful for a positive response.”

Uh, Leigh, let’s be careful with the P-word there. The reason that Ricky is out of uniform, of course, is his tendency to produce positive drug tests.

Finally, we have the mysterious Israeli raid on a suspected WMD facility in northern Syria. Neither country has said much about the incident, and what they have said has been doubletalk.

For example, Syrian President Bashar Assad said recently that the Israelis had merely bombed an “unused military building.”

Bash, buddy, I don’t know what the building was. But I highly doubt the Israelis would take huge risks to bomb an empty building.

I will concede one point, however.

After being blasted to hell by one of the best air forces in the world, you can bet that whatever was there before is now indeed an “unused military building.”