He May Be A Lying Messianic Megalomaniac With His Itchy Finger On The Nuclear Trigger, But…

.. well, but we should all be comforted knowing that he's our lying messianic megalomaniac with his itchy finger on the nuclear trigger. Because we are the "good guys," y'know. I mean, he may lie and cheat and torture and invade countries without an iota of justification, but, dammit, he's our liar and cheater and torturer and unjustified invader, and he wouldn't lie and cheat and torture and invade unjustifiably without, y'know, like, a "good" reason. Like fr'instance, just because he can. After separating all the wheat from the chaff, that's pretty much what seems to be the bottom line political argument now being made by the White House. In his little gander at the Bush administration's manly tumescent planning for nuking Iran, Sy Hersh wrote about Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hersh quotes a former senior intelligence official saying that "Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler." Who might "threaten another world war." Which is an interesting parallel for George Bush to be drawing, since between Bush and the Iranian President, Ahmadinejad isn't the one who has - like Hitler - gone and invaded any countries, ostensibly to save them from oppression within. Which was, of course, precisely Hitler's justification for invading Poland, after all. Well, true, it was a totally bogus fabricated justification. Pretty much an idea just like this: "The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." I'm not sure that "irony" is really an adequate description, when the person drawing parallels to Hitler and the instigation of a World War is a guy who literally could be looking in the mirror when he voices the equation. Ahmadinejad is, to be sure, a very spooky guy. But Juan Cole offers some very useful insight into all the escalated rhetoric about nuclear bombs. Basically, Cole says that Ahmadinejad and Bush are both hardliner extremists desperately trying to prop up tanking poll numbers. I'm not quite so sanguine about matters, myself. Billmon similarly identifies a "clear and present danger." I'm pinning my remaining vestiges of optimism on the fact that Bush seems to be scaring the holy bejeebers out of the more enlightened career professional minds at the Pentagon (says Hersh). And the hope that Scotty's increasingly unstable ripostes with the press are perhaps scaring the reporters, enough so that the fear Bush could actually bring about armageddon might ultimately get translated to news reports.