Joe Sobran: Bush is a madman.

The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.

Wow. Joe calls a spade a spade and a protestant a protestant, linking CowardlyCuriousGeorge FlyingBushMonkey's fanaticism to the mortal sin inherent in the protestant schism and its inevitable war with God-given conscience.

Ignore Mr. Sobran at your peril, kiddies. All rebellion - right, left, sexual, you name it - leads to a crack up. You cannot get rid of your conscience. If you ignore it, it will strike back at you in the most unimaginably horrific ways.

Islam, Bush has said, is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a few fanatics. Some, observing him, might say the same about Christianity. Bush makes one wonder where religion ends and psychosis begins. Is his foreign policy driven by a conviction that we are in the End Times, and that the Lord has anointed him to lead us? Is it mere accident that many of his remaining supporters believe so?

Last week one of those supporters assured me that the War on Terror is necessary because the Muslims are determined to exterminate us. As proof, he quoted a verse from the Koran about destroying infidels; he’d read this in a book by Hal Lindsey, the apocalyptic “new evangelical” author. I guess that’s what you’d call a theological slam-dunk, and it seems akin to Bush’s way of thinking about the world.

Smoking guns? For Bush the appropriate image is the loose cannon. In domestic policy alone he would rank as a disastrous president; but with his finger on the nuclear button he threatens to become an utter nightmare. With other fanatics egging him on, we may yet see those mushroom clouds Miss Rice worries about. No wonder Colin Powell got out of this administration while the getting was good; but will he ever give the public a frank account of what he saw inside it?

Even Pentagon war planners are alarmed at what Bush has done — and at what he may yet do. The retired generals who called for Donald Rumsfeld’s removal were really talking about Bush (the neocons were right about that). And Bush’s dismissal as “wild speculation” of Seymour Hersh’s report on his preparations for war on Iran was actually a chilling nondenial.

The Democrats have shamelessly encouraged him to prevent Iran from getting nukes by any means necessary; Ted Kennedy is one of the few Democrats who have insisted that these means must not include a nuclear attack, which Bush hasn’t ruled out.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are still playing follow-the-leader, even if it means following him over the precipice. We can hope only that the poll figures and the approaching elections will bring them to their senses.

The scandal of our time is that so many important people have failed to say what is obvious and urgent: that this president is out of his mind. Whether it’s clinical madness or fanaticism, it’s something more serious, and more dangerous, than stupidity. And the men around him can’t or won’t restrain him.

I'll go with fanaticism. Clinton was the sociopath.