Harley Sorensen, Special to SF Gate

Folks, our God-fearing president, George W. Bush, who claims to start every morning on his knees praying, now says that he gets his orders from God Himself.

I kid you not.

I refer you to June 24 article by Arnon Regular in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper. In the last paragraph of that article there's a Bush quote as related by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. Here, according to Abbas and Ha'aretz, is what Bush said:

God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you can help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.

That quote doesn't make clear whether God issues direct orders to Bush, or whether they discuss things first. but I'd guess discussions. It's hard to imagine God deciding anything of importance without without first getting input from Bush.

Over the years I've met a handful of people who regularly talk with God, but they usually do so only when they're off their medications.

Those who get instructions directly from the Almighty are twice blessed: They get their orders from the Highest Authority, and the orders are always to do what they would have done anyway.

Getting direct orders from God makes a president's life simpler. If God has spoken, the president doesn't have to observe the niceties with which presidents usually contend, things like getting congressional approval or United Nations agreement.

Bush's very own personal God connection explains a lot of things. Like Bush's disinterest in global warming.

Why should our duly elected president concern himself with global warming when God Himself has said, "Don't worry, be happy"?

Do you see how it works? With God in your corner, it matters not what you do, because God will protect you.

OK, I've been shilly-shallying around here, hesitant to come right out and say what I think, but I'm becoming convinced that our president, the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger, is a bona fide nutcase.

I really do. For him to say God told him to strike al-Qaida is just nutso. For him to say God told him to strike at Saddam, ditto. This guy is not dealing with a full deck.

To me, Bush's sanity has been suspect for a long time. He does so many things that defy logic, like his infamous tax cuts, approved by a thoroughly cowed Congress.

It doesn't make sense to reduce your income while increasing your spending and plunging into massive debt.

His blithe attitude toward the public debt he is creating indicates a failure to grasp reality.

His cavalier entry into two wars within two years, in total disregard of world opinion on the second one, indicates a man who just doesn't care what anyone thinks. Now that his ill-planned schemes in Afghanistan and Iraq are coming apart, I sense a bit of panic in the man.

Bush knew what everyone knew, that our armies could conquer. But he had no idea whether they, or anyone, could maintain a peace in nations as splintered as Afghanistan and Iraq. They can't. They're not trained for that. That's not their mission.

Bush is a good salesman, which is almost certainly why his father's friends chose him to be the front man for the Republican Party. He's a charmer, no doubt of that. Because of his sales ability, he was able to convince most Americans that war with Iraq was a necessity.

But America needs more than a slick salesman to lead the world. We need, at the very least, a man with mental stability. We don't have that with Bush. His rapid rise to power, without truly earning it as most presidents before him have done, has gone to his head.

So what we have in the White House today is a megalomaniac with a messianic complex, a man who believes that he and he alone can resolve the world's problems.

"I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East," he said. I, I, I, I, I! With Bush it's always "I." In a job that requires great humility, we have an egomaniac.

I don't expect many people to agree with my armchair psychoanalysis of a man I've never met. We don't like to admit that important people are crazy, or even that our relatives are crazy. Typically, we overlook their bizarre behavior until it gets so bizarre we can't ignore it anymore.

So, all I ask is that you pay attention. A man who claims to get orders from God, and who creates world-shaking events on the basis of those "orders," needs watching.


Harley Sorensen is a longtime journalist and liberal iconoclast. His column appears Mondays. E-mail him at harleysorensen@yahoo.com.

By John Helmer, www.russiajournal.com

http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/img/bushblairliars.jpg

Wars usually start with one large lie. Throwing more troops into the breach requires a great many little lies. Wars usually end when the lying can't staunch the bleeding and the stench.

According to the wife of the late David Kelly, the U.K. Defense Ministry expert on Iraqi weapons who committed suicide last Friday by cutting his left wrist and bleeding to death while on painkillers, "this was not really the kind of world he wanted to live in." But the kind of world prime ministers of England and presidents of the United States hatch when they go to war together should have been familiar to Kelly, as he was old enough to remember the Vietnam war. The Big Lie for which Kelly killed himself was no different from the one that created the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the invented Vietnamese attack on U.S. warships that was used to justify the first landings of U.S. troops 40 years ago. The little lies Tony Blair and George Bush go on telling as they too try to land more troops and fight against guerrilla war soon to expand into a national liberation struggle - these lies are no different. Not even the methods for feeding them to the press have changed.

I remember the day in 1972 when I was poking around the archives of Time in New York - I was a consultant to one of Time Inc.'s senior executives at the time - and I came across a file of telexes from the Time war correspondent in Saigon. His New York editor had begun by asking him to write a story on the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing in Vietnam, especially the Ho Chi Minh Trail, through which Vietnamese forces were being replenished and resupplied. The editor was being told by officials in Washington that the bombing was crippling the Vietnamese effort and the war would soon be over. The officials wanted Congressional backing for more money and more troops on the ground. They need the press to put the justification into print.

At the same time, the Saigon journalist reported back, someone had dropped an unusual package on his doorstep. It was a report on the impact of the U.S. bombing campaign. From the stamps on the document and the packaging, it appeared to have been drafted by British intelligence. But the Time man was suspicious, and he wrote New York. He wasn't sure about the facts, he said, because the capabilities of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army looked much better on the ground. The timing suggested to the reporter either that the British were working secretly with their American counterparts to fabricate information or that U.S. intelligence was forging British intelligence in order to make their own claims look more credible. The Time reporter told his editor that, while he was prepared to report U.S. military claims for what they were worth, he wasn't going to report that a secret British intelligence source had corroborated and confirmed them. A great many little lies were to follow, and Time's editors and reporters were not able to resist all of them. The outcome is well-known.

A great many people in newspaper editorial offices, as well as in government offices in Washington and London, know very well that the intelligence for which David Kelly killed himself was fabricated. They already know that the stream of little lies has begun. They know that it isn't worth their career prospects, let alone their lives, to expose them. In time, those who remember Vietnam realize, Blair and Bush won't be able to staunch the investigations of the family, business and other links they, their advisors and supporters have with the war machine they have set in motion in Iraq. In time, those who remember Vietnam understand, the fighting men of the U.S. army will fear every Arab they see and will lose the will to risk their lives for a cause they don't believe is worth it.

As the gap grows between the facts on the ground in Iraq and the facts in the air of Washington and London, even the media proprietors who have willingly retold the lies and fashioned many of their own - men as corrupt and conniving as Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch - will recognize the noses on their faces and smell the way the wind is blowing.

By themselves, Time's Saigon correspondent in 1972, and his New York editor couldn't stop the bombing campaign in Vietnam. By himself, David Kelly couldn't stop the Iraq war. That is going to require a great deal more transfer of treasure and loss of blood. Perfidious Blair and lying Bush aren't the kind of people who ask themselves whether this is really the kind of world they want to live in.