With friends like these…

Think of it this way:

You are in the middle of a no-holds-barred fight with this crazy dude who broke into your home hollering and screaming about injustice and Satan and the fact that he would be happy to die just as long as he takes you with him. He used to be a friend of yours a long time ago, or at least an acquaintance, and you did some business with him once. But then he started telling everyone how horrible you were, spreading malicious lies about you and threatening to kill you and your family.

He even tried to do it one time, several years before, when he attacked you in an underground garage with no warning. He scratched you up pretty bad, but fortunately the gun he had with him misfired, so you got away relatively intact. That time, he turned and ran, and you wrote him off as a coward.

But this time, he came to kill you, your wife, your kids. He has already kicked in your wife's teeth and gouged out your eye. You know he fights dirty, but you don't care. You just want to settle the score, get revenge and protect your family from this madman. The children are safe now, but what if he gets past you?

So you start fighting back just as hard and as mean as the bad guy. You bite his ear off and try to gouge out his eye, too. He's starting to look like a bloody mess, and you think he just might be about to say uncle when your neighbor knocks on the door to see what's going on.

You and your neighbor have not always seen things eye to eye, which is why there is a fence that runs between your yards, but fences make good neighbors is what they say. So you figure the many years of car-pooling kids, block parties and polite howdies at the end of the driveway when you pick up your mail are finally going to pay off.

Thank God for neighbors, you think.

Come on in, you holler while the bad dude is sticking his fingers up your nostrils to try to rip your nose off your face. You figure your neighbor will jump right in and throw a few punches at the crazy dude, or at the very least pick up the phone and call 911.

But 911 apparently never even occurs to the guy, and instead of throwing punches he just says kind of sheepishly that it doesn't seem like a fair fight.

"What!" you shout back. "Of course it's not a fair fight. This maniac broke in here and he's hyped up on some kind of unholy drug that makes him think he is invincible and immortal and he's ripping my nose off and all I want to know is WHEN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO HELP?"

"Well, not so fast. Of course, I'm going to help," says the neighbor. "I'm against maniacs as much as you are, but I just want to make sure I know all the facts. After all, maybe this guy has good reason to hate you. I don't know, and I'm not saying he does necessarily, but I probably need to at least take a little closer look to assess the situation."

And with that, your neighbor climbs up on your back and throws you off balance and reaches around your neck and starts to shut down your windpipe with his locked arms and just about then the maniac is picking up a dining room chair and rushing across the room at you like a medieval knight trying to run the king through with his own sword.

Fortunately you manage to swing around in the nick of time, and instead of impaling you, the crazy dude actually hits your neighbor a glancing blow, scratching him along the arm before hitting the wall and breaking the chair into pieces.

"Hey, why'd you do that?" asks your neighbor, and when you don't say anything back, he lifts one of his arms from around your neck and grabs ahold of a hunk of hair and pulls back on your scalp like a hooded al-Qaida murderer holding up the sawed-off head of an American hostage in Iraq, and it hurts like hell.

"I'm talking to you," he says. "Next time that guy attacks, be more careful or I'll knock you down myself," and now you are starting to get worried that you have two madmen in the house instead of just one. The difference is that the one is trying to kill you outright, and the other is trying to kill you by helping you.

"Look," you say. "Let's just take care of this maniac, and then we can settle our problems."

But your neighbor is having a hard time seeing how the maniac is really a threat to him, especially in his weakened condition, and so he is thinking maybe it is time to declare a truce and clean up the place and get back to normal, but then the maniac pulls out a gun and starts pointing it at your head, only now your neighbor's head is right behind your head, and if he shoots you he shoots both of you, and so your neighbor yanks your head one last time, calls you an incompetent jerk, and says with more than a hint of derision, "What will it take to get you to do something about that maniac who's trying to kill us?"

Or think of it like this:

When the hell are the Democrats going to get off the president's back and and let him do what he was elected to do - protect America from the terrorists who want to kill us all?