'Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.'(Socrates)***

Wayne Brown

I don't know how else to put this: Is US vice-president Dick Cheney mad? And has his titular boss, GW Bush, started all unawares down the road to impeachment? It may be too soon to answer those questions, but not to begin asking them.

Take Dick 'Darth Vader' Cheney. In 2002, preparing America for his and Rumsfeld's long-planned attack upon Iraq, Cheney went on the air to soulfully warn about Saddam's non-existent nuclear weapons' programme and an apocryphal Prague meeting between an Iraqi intelligence official and 9-11's Mohammed Attar.

The following year, he lied even more brazenly, denying he'd said what he'd said in the first place, though his words were preserved on tape. A dispassionate observer might have concluded that Cheney was not truthful; but he really ought to have put a question mark next to the brazenness, and held that thought.

Likewise, when Cheney predicted the American invaders would be greeted as liberators, one might have concluded that he could hardly be more mistaken. We now know the convicted felon Ahmed Chalabi, the Bush Administration's main man in Iraq (currently making another victory lap around Washington), had been feeding Cheney fake intelligence all along.

But was that really enough to sell an apparently grown man on a 'liberator' scenario whereby Iraqis whose sons or husbands had just been killed by American bombers and tanks on the road to Baghdad would put away their grief to throw flowers in the street?

Most outlandishly, six months ago, Cheney declared the Iraq insurgency to be in its 'last throes' - this, just at the point that it was spiraling out of control. Yet many people (including this columnist) merely concluded the Veep was betraying an astonishing contempt for his audience's intelligence - and left it at that.

In the past fortnight, however, watching a man, himself mortally imperiled by his top aide's indictment for perjury, nonetheless going to the mat to try to preserve his administration's assumption of the right to torture those it seizes - a practice that, by itself, has destroyed the meaning of America in the eyes of a horrified world, and one which even a Republican Congress is currently bent on repudiating - this columnist has been struck by a sense of a man too obsessed to be mindful of - anything! Including reality.

And in that light to consider the gloomy possibility that when the Veep vented his recent rubbish about the proximate end of the insurgency, he was in fact uttering what was to him an article of blind faith, one which he needed personally, and one that was therefore quite impervious to all the real-world evidence that the exact opposite was true, and that the insurgency was in fact poised to shatter Iraq.

Lastly, there was the recent enigmatic remark of Brent Scowcroft's, Bush Snr's National Security Advisor and for many years a good friend of the current Vice-President. 'Cheney,' Scowcroft told the New Yorker tersely, 'isn't Cheney [anymore].' What exactly did he mean?

The jury's still out on this matter, as I said, and I for one am not ready to throw my Jack on the staggering proposition that the Vice-President of the United States is mentally quite unbalanced: mad. But here (very quietly) is the ten of trumps. Events are unfolding, and before too long we shall see whether Mr Cheney has anything in his hand to beat it.

Or take the President himself, currently in freefall in the polls as, in a whirring, clamorous flock, the chickens of five years of hubris, incompetence, uncaring and mendacity come home to roost.

Iraq, Katrina; gas prices, especially in conjunction with the staggering profits made last year by Mr Bush' true constituency, the oil companies.

The utter fatuity (evidence of which is still coming to light) of his crony appointee, FEMA's Mike ('Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job') Brown. The trashing of his Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, and the indictment of Scooter Libby. Both the legal and the gathering political threat currently hanging over his indispensable puppeteer, Karl Rove.

The belated explosion of American shame over Mr Bush's torture policy: the excrescence for which his presidency will be remembered, along with the unprovoked attack which destroyed a whole country (and has so far gotten 15,000 American boys killed or crippled).

Mr Bush, bayed by the media in Latin America, declaring - in a lie so stark, so beyond-brazen, that one cringed to watch him say it - 'We do not torture!': this, even while he was threatening to veto legislation before the Congress banning torture; and this, even as the Washington Post broke the story of the existence of half-a-dozen US torture camps, erected by his administration, all over recently democratised Eastern Europe.

(The International Committee of the Red Cross, the European Union and human rights groups have demanded information about these 'black holes', which an EU spokesman said could be in violation of international law. Quipped US comic Jon Stewart: 'Isn't it marvellous how these brand new democracies are helping us to destroy our own?')

The contempt in the streets, and the disrespect at the conference table, shown to the US President on his flopped South American tour last week.

The defeat last Tuesday of his party's gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, never mind that Mr Bush, fecklessly playing the Jack of his own reputation, flew into the state to campaign for him. Mr Bush's baulked attempt (defeated in Congress last week by his own GOP) to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling (well, of course). The record-breaking US trade deficits just posted by the Commerce Department, both overall and specifically in relation to such countries as China and Canada, and to Central and South America.

And, last but not least - for these things have a critical mass, beyond which it's virtually impossible to recover - the current cataract of Bush jokes flooding the 'Net.

(Should we repeat one here? Well, why not. I think we have a right to a little relaxation, after all, after three long years spent emphasising, to often skeptical readers - for even in these parts the cherished notion of 'good America' dies hard - the threat which this shallow, strutting man and his barbarian raiders posed to the rest of the world.

So:
Einstein dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter tells him, 'Well, you look like Einstein, but you have no idea what some people will do to sneak into Heaven. Can you prove you're really Einstein?'

Einstein ponders for a few seconds, then asks, 'Could I have a blackboard and some chalk?'
Saint Peter snaps his fingers and a blackboard and chalk appear. Einstein scribbles the mathematical formulae leading to his theory of relativity, and Peter is impressed. 'You're really Einstein,' he says. 'Welcome to heaven.'

The next to arrive is Picasso. Again, Peter asks for his credentials. 'Mind if I use that blackboard and chalk?' Picasso says. 'Go ahead,' Peter says; and Picasso erases Einstein's equations and sketches a stunning mural. Again, Peter is satisfied. 'You're definitely the great artist you claim to be,' he says. 'Come in.'

Then Peter looks up and sees GW Bush. Peter scratches his head and says, 'Einstein and Picasso both managed to prove their identity. Can you prove yours?'
'Who's Einstein and Picasso?' asks GWB.

'Aw, hell,' Peter sighs, opening the gate. 'Come on in, George.')
Every one of these either is, or signals, a setback for Mr Bush. Some are relatively minor, but several are major - and some are downright crippling.

They've been coming in at the rate of something like one a week lately, and they're likely to go right on coming in: the Bush cabal spent much of its first term making powerful enemies at the CIA, the DIA and the State Department, and it's they, the career professionals at these institutions, who are now bringing Mr Bush to his knees, with a remorseless series of damaging 'leaks', as cumulative as little poisoned darts.

And here's the point: it's against this background of ever-worsening weakness that Mr Bush (like Nixon before him), faced by a major investigation into illegalities cooked up in the White House, has decided, not to clean house as Reagan cannily did after Iran-Contra, but to stonewall, to look angry, and to sulk.

There're distinct elements of the newly aroused US media which currently think they may have Cheney in their crosshairs. But already a more ambitious - or merely commonsensical - few are looking beyond the Vice-President to the President himself; and their smiles are not nice smiles. My guess is that Mr Bush is in more danger than he thinks.

Besides, there's such a thing as 'middle America'. Its denizens are often ingenuous, complacent, and much too susceptible for the safety of the democracy to having their buttons pushed - 'Supporting our troops,' and so on. But for all that, middle America is basically decent. And the story of the polls of late is that it has seen through Bush.

So, the Wall Street Journal, hardly a liberal rag, last week found the president's approval rating down in Never-Never land at 38 percent. (An even more recent AP-Ipsos poll put it at 37.) Less than one-third of Americans now see Mr Bush as 'honest and straightforward'. And nearly 60 per cent now say he 'deliberately misled' America into Iraq.

These aren't judgments about Mr Bush's policies; they're judgments about his character. And what they mean is that, at long last, most Americans have come to see their president as the callow and felonious blusterer the rest of the world has long perceived him to be. Hard to imagine how even an American president can 'bounce back' from that!

(Not coincidentally, Democrats last week drove from office the Democratic mayor of St Paul, Minnesota, who had betrayed his party by endorsing Bush in the presidential election last year.

In California, they also sank all four ballot initiatives presented by Governor Schwarzenegger, that rightwing wolf in the sheep's clothing of a moderate - giving the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson the fun headline, next morning, 'Arnold Terminates Himself'.)

'It's not just that they lost these elections,' said Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, 'but that none of their old tricks worked.'
Meanwhile - to end this column where Mr Bush's political demise began, where it has stayed, and where it will end - in the 17 days since American forces suffered their 2,000th death in Iraq, 58 more US soldiers were killed by insurgents.

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