Please Fire Me

For the first time, Her Majesty's diaries are opened...

'Had Mrs 'call me Carole' Middleton on the phone after lunch. Wanting to check 'our outfits don't clash on the big day'. One seriously doubts they would.'

Queen of sixteen sovereign nations, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. She's one of the world's most well-known and powerful leaders and has reigned for almost 60 years. She's been privy to every major event and decision. But what does she really think?

'One does enjoy the Eurovision Song Contest. Lovely to be reminded how much more civilised the British are than our European neighbours. Royal Eurovision Fancy Dress Party to celebrate. Unfortunately Camilla misread the invitation as 'Euro-tunnel Fancy Dress Party' and came as a train.'

Taking in the momentous events of 2011, including two Royal Weddings, the phone hacking scandal and the Duke of Edinburgh's 90th Birthday Tarts and Vicars Party, these diaries reveal the seldom-seen workings of state and reveal how an octogenarian is quietly ruling the world and still has time for a gin.

'No, Mr Clegg, people born in Libya are not 'Librarians'.

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Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes. --Tom DeLay, America's Community Bankers meeting, March 12, 2003

* After revealing absurd 911 phone calls and America's dumbest criminal antics, former Saturday Night Live writer Leland Gregory skewers political pandering and pen-pushing philosophizing.

Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Inside Idiots in Charge: Lies, Trick, Misdeeds, and Other Political Untruthiness Gregory offers more than 250 accounts of bumbling bureaucrats on both sides of political party lines:

* David Spellman became mayor of Black Hawk, Colo., on July 12, 2006, a week after pleading guilty to felony menacing and third-degree assault for pistol-whipping his wife with a handgun and firing three shots in 2005.

* County officials in Vermillion, Ind., were told by state homeland security officials in July 2006 to stop using the special emergency-only highway message boards to advertise their charity fish fries and spaghetti dinners.

* District 1 Town Councilor David Watson resigned from his position as council vice chairman on January 23, 2007, after unintentionally forwarding an e-mail to 18 members of the New Elementary School Building Committee. The e-mail contained nine embedded images of topless women under the heading This Is National Women's Breast Awareness Day. The only other text in the e-mail read, Beats . . . Martin Luther King Day, doesn't it?

It's important for people to know that I'm the president of everybody. --President George W. Bush, from Air Force One, January 14, 2005

Who Leland Gregory voted for in the 2004 presidential election is his business. But when George W. Bush won a second term, Gregory had to be doing cartwheels around his computer. The humorist, after all, makes a career of recording human behavior at, let's just say, its less-than-brilliant moments.

Bush-Whacked does a thorough job of tracking the president's language mangling as well as the inept bungling of his administration:

* And so during these holiday seasons, we thank our blessings . . . --GWB at Fort Belvoir, Va., December 21, 2004.

* Through bureaucratic mismanagement, parts for a top-secret spy plane, originally intended for destruction, were discovered being auctioned off on eBay. --New York Post

* (T)he illiteracy level of our children are appalling. --GWB, Washington, D.C., January 23, 2004

With his expert nose for nuttiness, Gregory includes numerous perplexing quotes, wacky anecdotes, and weird one-liners in this hysterical collection. This isn't the president at his finest, just Dubya at his funniest.