Charlie doesn't even have colonel's rank

Only Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times could make invidious comparisons between Charlie Sheen and Muammar el-Qaddafi:

Mr. Sheen took a drug test on Saturday and allowed the results (negative) to be revealed on Good Morning America on ABC. He also assured the Today show on NBC that he had cured himself of substance abuse. “I closed my eyes and made it so with the power of my mind,” is how he put it.
But a urine sample and a blood test can’t trace what troubles Mr. Sheen at the moment: he is addicted to explaining himself on the air.
His dependence is not unique. Troubled politicians and celebrities often turn to television and radio to retune their images radically; it’s a One Step program to persuade themselves of their own powers of persuasion. And self-delusion has no borders. The embattled Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, is turning out to be the Charlie Sheen of Middle Eastern dictators: he couldn’t resist a chance to tell Christiane Amanpour that there have been no anti-government demonstrations in Tripoli. “They love me,” he said of his people in an interview scheduled for this week on ABC.
Mr. Sheen’s grandiose rants on the nation’s two leading morning talk shows (and via live stream on the gossip website TMZ) were more unmoored than most, but he showed all the usual symptoms of an insulated star with an unreasoned belief in his own invulnerability. (20/20 is showing the full interview on ABC on Tuesday.)
Asked if he was bipolar, Mr. Sheen said he was “bi-winning.” That he only made himself look worse isn’t exactly new. Mr. Sheen, who spoke out after CBS suspended production of his hit television sitcom, Two and a Half Men, follows in the unsteady footsteps of Tom Cruise and his 2005 diatribe against psychiatry, Ritalin, and Brooke Shields. There were echoes of Michael Jackson’s infamous 2003 interview with Martin Bashir, in which he described sharing a bed with children at the Neverland ranch, and also of Whitney Houston, who in 2002 denied to Diane Sawyer that she used crack. (“Crack is whack,” she said.)
Many disgraced politicians suffer from the same blend of naïveté and grandiosity, but oddly, some of them are better actors. John Edwards, who kept changing his story on network television but never stopped trying to seduce his audience, was a tableau of candor and remorse, except about the things he hadn’t yet admitted were true.
This week Mr. Sheen has to share the spotlight of self-delusion. There is Colonel Qaddafi and also Bernard L. Madoff. After trying to explain himself in The New York Times in February, Mr. Madoff gave a second prison interview, published in this week’s New York magazine, saying on tape: “I am a good person.” Even Lindsay Lohan, who could be facing jail time if she is found guilty of stealing a $2,500 necklace, sat down for a two-part interview with Extra, which will be shown this week.
Like a lot of bad habits, Mr. Sheen’s addiction started out small, with a few rambling calls to radio shows, then escalated into full-blown interviews on network television and TMZ. The camera was even more damaging than his words, and those were downright nutty.
“I am on a drug; it’s called Charlie Sheen,” he told ABC. “It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body,” he said.
When the ABC reporter told him he seemed “erratic”, Mr. Sheen tried to explain. “You borrow my brain for five seconds, you’d be like, ‘Dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard,’ ” he said, adding that his brain “fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm.” As he spoke, Mr. Sheen shifted, weaved, and gesticulated; at times, his performance looked like an impersonation of Christian Bale’s impersonation of a crack-addicted former boxer in The Fighter.
Mr. Sheen denied charges of violence against women (“Consider the source”) and he railed against Alcoholics Anonymous, CBS, and most of all his show’s executive producer, Chuck Lorre, though this time he refrained from referring to Mr. Lorre as “Chaim”, as he did on a radio show and which was interpreted by many as an anti-Semitic slur. (It was after that last straw that CBS suspended the show.) Mr. Sheen didn’t exactly apologize for his remarks; he told ABC that he was sorry that Mr. Lorre couldn’t take a joke.
It’s always a little shocking when self-absorbed celebrities with all the resources and high-priced advice in the world do something so clearly against their own self-interest, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Whatever it was that led them to go off the rails in the first place is the very thing pushing them to make matters worse.