One of our favorite side tunnels on the internet tubes is The Fat Lady:

It seems our president can’t get enough of doomsday rhetorical novelists. First – he snapped up everything Tom Clancy ever wrote pre 9/11 in an effort to understand just how Clancy figured out that Washington D.C. might prove be a prime terrorist target. Then he brings in Michael Crichton to prove global warming’s just a myth – now its apocalyptic writers like Joel Rosenberg to council him on Middle Eastern policy. Next thing you know he’ll be channeling Tolkien while insisting the Middle East is really Middle Earth and the bad Arab du jour is actually Sauron in disguise. I’d be laughing right now if so many people weren’t dying.

Have you ever listened to one of these ‘we’re all gonna die’ fanatics? Actually – they’ve been kinda hard to miss lately – CNN has gaggles of ‘em on every other frickin minute. The only things missing from their appearances are tin-foil hats and lead covered bibles to thump repeatedly. No one – I repeat – no one in their right mind believes this shit; not even them, if push comes to shove. It’s just another way of separating the under-educated from their money; but Bush put ‘em front and center. Called them in specially, he did. Hell – Rosenberg was so pumped at his invite he crowed all over town about it. Look at me! I’m counseling the President on Middle East policy! Whee!

I used to think Bush was as cynical as the rest of the neocon evangelical fanboys; but lately I’m having stirrings of alarm. If he doesn’t actually believe this shit – he wants to; and I’m not sure what’s worse. Either way – it means he’s setting up the dominos, hoping that they’ll fall. As goes the Middle East – so goes the world. Don’t forget – a world war was begun over the assassination of an obscure member of Austro-Hungarian royalty. No one, so far, seems inclined to put the brakes on any of the violence over there. On the contrary – Bush and his close-knit little band of Rapture revolutionaries seem to be encouraging it. Cheney’s almost rubbing his hands with glee, Bolton just sits in his U.N. version of an ivory tower waggling his mustache, trying to piss everyone off; and Condoleezza Rice spends all of her free time giving recitals.

So – I don’t know about you folks – but I think its high time Bush changed his reading material. Maybe a nice subscription to Vogue? I’d rather him develop fantasies about Scarlett Johansson than salivate over possibly ending the world.

Before he's done this guy is gonna get a lot more Americans killked.