Ha Ha

I hope it hurts:

Never mind those planned congressional hearings on the hows and whys of government incompetence in the attempt to cope with Hurricane Katrina.

There were not only logistical and bureaucratic troubles but, astonishingly for the Bush White House, political snafus. Maybe there's a simple explanation: Karl Rove's kidney stones.

Washington insiders have been buzzing that President Bush's guru-in-chief - often called "Bush's Brain" - has been suffering from the painful urinary-tract malady for the past couple of weeks, causing him to miss some key Katrina strategy sessions.

I'm told that the 54-year-old deputy White House chief of staff - who apparently was feeling well enough yesterday to travel outside the nation's capital - visited the hospital, possibly twice, to relieve his agony since Labor Day.

White House officials declined to speak on the record about Rove's kidney stones, due to the extreme delicacy of discussions about internal organs of top presidential advisers.

But the National Institutes of Health define a kidney stone as "a hard mass developed from crystals that separate from the urine and build up on the inner surfaces of the kidney. ... Usually, the first symptom of a kidney stone is extreme pain, which occurs when a stone acutely blocks the flow of urine. ... Sometimes nausea and vomiting occur. Later, pain may spread to the groin.