Mr Bu$h has been taking a premature victory lap in the Middle East lately and apparently still warning everyone about the evil Iranians.

Speaking in Israel, he’s been especially solicitous, remembering that country is in charge of our foreign and military policy in the Middle East and the hard right barking dogs over there are very quick to shut down the flow of ca$h to the republican Party if it looks like there’s any sort of tendency to stop paying attention to the region. Facing a really tough election in November, the r’s need all they can get because the most important allies, the Billionaire’s club and Wall Street can’t carry it all themselves, and many of the lower-level supporters are disenchanted by what the party is offering this year by way of Maximum Leader.

While visiting Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Israel, Mr Bu$h apparently teared up while viewing an aerial photograph of Auschswitz. This happens. I’ve visited Dachau several times and the effect is horrible. My wife had never seen me cry before, and I think that is the response of most people.

Apparently Mr Bu$h took a cue from Avner Shalev, the head of the museum commission, and after discussing the matter with our alleged Russian expert Condoleeza Rice in front of the photograph, our Great Warrior Leader decided that President Roosevelt should have given the order to bomb Auschwitz in order to stop the exterminations. Not bomb the camp, but rather the railroad tracks leading to the camp because that would have somehow stopped the slaughter.

Considering the inaccuracy of US bombing during that war, the bombing would probably have crept to the camp and that would have been doing the German government of the time a favor. And if somehow they Americans had managed to hit the railroad tracks and not killed the prisoners in the camp, what would have happened? They Germans would have unloaded the cars short of the bomb point and walked the prisoners into the camp.

So this happy little bit of Bu$h mental wandering and pandering wasn’t about saving the Jews on Auschwitz, but rather about saving the Jews in Israel by stopping the Greatest Evil The World Has Ever Seen ™ Maumoud Ahmadinejad.

(If you talk to the oldest Germans you can find, you will learn that none of them were Nazis, they all hated Hitler and deplored the Holocaust, and you come away wondering how Adolph Hitler held off the Allies for 6 years all by himself.) In much the same way
we are being told today that this one man, Ahmadinejad, all by himself, is compelling a nation of 70 million people to destroy Israel. This man who has no authority to order the transfer of one soldier from one camp to another, whose job is to talk to the international community, who has no voice in the decision of items of national importance, has been inflated by the Bu$h malAdministration into some great monolithic commander-in-chief dedicated to one goal. And the government of Ehud Olmert has been happy to cooperate in this lie. Mr Ahmadinejad has been falsely elevated to the position that Mr Bu$h secretly desires for himself.

Led by the lies and siren call of Big Oil’s greed and the loyal treason of the Likudnik agents of PNAC, America has been dragged into the tarpit of Iraq , which of course is only the first step in enabling Israel’s expansion to the Litani River which Israel needs to continue to grow.

Led by the lies and siren call of Big Oil’s greed and the loyal treason of the Likudnik agents of PNAC, America has been dragged into the tarpit of Iraq , which of course is only the first step in enabling Israel’s expansion to the Litani River which Israel needs to continue to grow. An expanding Israel needs not only new land, but more important, more water resources.

The danger for America is two-fold: the continuing drive to serve Israel’s interests in the Middle East by eliminating its potential enemies does serve America’s long-term strategic interests. A strong military position in that region ensures control of the oil, thereby denying it to economic rivals such as Russia China and India. But the rising cost of this military posture and power projection is becoming a crippling economic threat to the middle class, which is the only basis for democracy. The ongoing and soon to be permanent tax cuts for the millionaires like Messers Bu$h and Cheney (and many if not most of Congress) impose a growing strain on a drowning middle class as the nation struggles to pay for a Defense Department consuming more money than all the other countries in the world combined.

The second great danger for America is in that Mr Bu$h dearly loves his position as dictator-in-all-but-name. He is not the stupid dolt that many think he is, but rather a sly, scheming man with a badly damaged psyche.

He has said it at least twice. (This clip’s audio is very poor and you will have to pay close attention to hear the sound bite.)

America should be seriously considering whether Mr Bu$h will actually leave the White House in January 2009.

The constant (and rising) drumbeat of war against Iran would provide him with the perfect reason to “postpone” the November elections due to a self-created “national emergency.”

Can you seriously imagine the Democratic “leaders” in Congress stopping him?