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DECEMBER 21, 2010 By JAMES TARANTO

Does Janet Napolitano suffer from a rare dissociative disorder?

Evidence has emerged suggesting that the U.S. secretary of homeland security may suffer from a rare dissociative disorder called Ganser syndrome. As described by WebMD.com:

The most well-recognized symptom of Ganser syndrome is the so-called symptom of approximate answers (alternately designated in the literature by the German terms vorbeireden [talking past], vorbeigehen [to pass by], or danebenreden [talking next to]). Here, the patient responds to questions with an incorrect answer, but by the nature of the answer reveals an understanding of the question posed. This can be illustrated by the patient answering "3" when asked, "How many legs has a horse?" or "black" when asked "What color is snow?" or "Tuesday" when asked "What is the day after Sunday?" Frequently, the patient answers a number of questions with these odd approximate answers. This is in direct contrast to answers that are simply nonsensical, perseverative, or otherwise inappropriate.

To be clear, an example of a perseverative answer would be "Failure is not an option." A nonsensical one would be just about anything Vice President Biden says. But Janet Napolitano's latest utterance falls into the approximate category.

In a much-discussed interview with ABC's "World News Tonight," Mediaite.com reports, Diane Sawyer asked Napolitano about the possibility of a terror attack over the holidays. The secretary answered: "What I say to the American people is that . . . thousands of people are working 24/7, 364 days a year to keep the American people safe."

She's had a long year.

The minimum number of days in a year is 365. So what was Napolitano trying to say? Our first thought was that the Homeland Security Department doesn't work on--pardon the expression, Miss Totenberg--Christmas, which would explain how that guy managed to get on a plane last year with a bomb in his drawers. This would be consistent with a Ganser diagnosis. WebMD notes that questions have been raised about Ganser's "status as a true mental illness versus a specific form of malingering." But while those questions have "been the subject of multiple journal articles and book chapters," they have yet to be answered with precision.

In a 2003 article for the Journal of Medical Humanities, Mady Schutzman offered a provocative hypothesis. In the course of researching "hysteria as a cultural and relational phenomenon rather than a disorder belonging to women's bodies," Schutzman stumbled upon a curious phenomenon known as "humor," which bears an uncanny resemblance to the symptoms of Ganser syndrome:

I discovered a performative trope--a slippery kind of verbal humor--that epitomized "talking past the point" and relocated its dynamic outside the boundaries of medical science. . . .

Jokes rely upon "getting the point" just at the boundaries of the point; that is, jokes are about sidestepping the point, a kind of punning, taking the literal and tweeking [sic] it, bending it so that we are made precisely aware of what was "past," what was expected, precisely from the vantage point of the unexpected. A master of this form of comedic repartee was Groucho Marx. "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Or, "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

And inside of a plane, the underwear bomber flies on Christmas.

If Napolitano is suffering from Ganser syndrome, what are the implications for homeland security? The good news, according to WebMD: "Symptoms usually resolve spontaneously." The bad news: "Occasionally, they may be followed by a major depressive episode."

"The full Ganser syndrome is considered very rare," WedMD reports, noting that "fewer than 100 cases have been described and documented in the literature." But we wonder if the disorder doesn't often go undiagnosed. Remember the Beatles song "Eight Days a Week"? Maybe the Fab Five had it.

Coming to Our Census
The results of the 2010 census are out, and it comes as no surprise that the population is moving south and west. In the 113th Congress, Texas will gain four House seats, Florida two, and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington one apiece.

These gains will come at the expense of New York and Ohio, each losing two seats, and Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, one seat apiece.

The shifts also will be reflected in the Electoral College (each state has one elector per House and Senate seat). The result is that a Republican who carried the same states as George W. Bush in 2004 would have 292 electoral votes, a gain of six; a Democrat who carried the same states (plus one district from Nebraska) as Barack Obama in 2008 would have 359 electoral votes, a decline of six.

As to how this will affect the partisan makeup in the House two years hence, a few things are clear: Massachusetts, with its all-Democratic delegation, will be down a donk, while Louisiana will have one less trunk. The Pelican State's lone Democratic representative in the 112th Congress is from a black-majority district, which will need to be preserved under the Voting Rights Act.

In the remaining states, Republicans hold an advantage in the redistricting process. They will hold both the governorships and state legislatures in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, and will have a say in Missouri (where they control the legislature), Nevada (the governorship) and New York (the state Senate). In Arizona, Iowa, New Jersey and Washington, district lines are drawn by independent commissions. (The National Conference of State Legislatures has a handy red-yellow-and-blue map of partisan control.)

The one bright spot for Dems is Obama's home state, Illinois, where the governor and both legislative houses are donk-held. Republicans picked up four House seats in the Land of Lincoln last month and held a vulnerable open one (vacated by now-Sen. Mark Kirk). The Dems ought to have the opportunity to make sure that the lost seat is a Republican one and that other GOP seats become more vulnerable.

Two other states to watch in the redistricting process are California (53 seats) and North Carolina (13), both of which were redistricted by Democrats last time around. California, which has a 34-19 Democratic majority, will have lines drawn by an independent commission for the first time; and North Carolina, the only Southern state with a Democrat-majority House delegation (7-6), will have a Republican-controlled Legislature--and while its governor is a Democrat, she does not have veto power over redistricting.

Have You Stopped Beating the Heat Yet?
Want proof that "global warming" is nonsense? It's unfalsifiable. A March 20, 2000, article from the Independent, a left-wing London paper, has been making the rounds recently that declares:

Britain's winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain's culture, as warmer winters--which scientists are attributing to global climate change--produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.

More than a decade later Britain seems to have--pardon the expression, Miss Totenberg--a white Christmas in store. So London's other left-wing Daily, the Guardian, publishes a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose article by George Monbiot titled "That Snow Outside Is What Global Warming Looks Like": "There is now strong evidence to suggest that the unusually cold winters of the last two years in the UK are the result of heating elsewhere." Like maybe in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas comes during the summer?

Down there, the Sydney Morning Herald has a story with this headline: "There's a Mini Ice Age Coming, Says Man Who Beats Weather Experts." Global warmists will no doubt respond by demanding to know if he's stopped beating the experts yet.