I heard an interviewe Sunday morning with McQuire Gibson, head of the American Association of Researchers in Baghdad. He was talking about the destruction over the weekend of the National Museum in Baghdad, home to over 170,000 totally irreplaceable items that record the birth of western civilization in the "fertile crescent" (the huge "oasis" between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in which Baghdad is built). For all of Saddam Hussein's crimes against humankind, whatever they may be, he was never so out of control or so greedy as to lay waste to, or sell off, or melt down, his nation's historical treasures, no matter how beseiged the city was. Yet in just 48 hours, thanks to Bush's paranoid schizophrenic religious delusions, FIVE THOUSAND YEARS of history have been wiped from the map, some forever.

Looters have carried off or smashed everything they could lay their hands on in the museum - from clay tablets that record the mysteries of one of Earth's most ancient civilizations, to gold and silver artifacts. Most of the gold and silver will undoubtedly be melted down and sold, while stone artifacts will be smashed or end up sold to some conscienceless private dealer (this should be a considered an act of global terrorism!) who will keep it locked away in a safe for their own obsessive "enjoyment." Gibson said the rioters even destroyed the museum's irreplaceable records - there is now no way of ever fully knowing just how much has been lost. Gibson's voice shook as he described the tragedy. Many of the artifacts in the museum, he said, formed the images that students all around the world have seen in history and art books - images as clearly stamped in the consciousness of some as the bust of Nefertiti or the Pieta - yet even more precious because the treasures of Baghdad were so much more ancient.

Gibson said the Bush administration and Pentagon KNEW where the museum was - precisely - and knew what was there and how very vulnerable it would be. Curators and historians pleaded with the Pentagon to provide protection to the museum during and after the invasion. Yet Bush did nothing. Instead, while scores of troops were assigned to guard the liquor stores at the Baghdad airport, not one contingent was sent to guard the museum. So these are the Bush administration's priorities? Our allegedly "sober" president prizes booze more than he prizes the very foundations of western civilization?

I strongly suspect that allowing the museum to be trashed was intentional - totally, unconscionably intentional. Why? Because we have a mentally ill, delusional religious fanatic sitting in the White House, surrounded by a "cult" of delusional religious fanatics. To name just a few names: Pentecostal extremist John Ashcroft, who holds regular prayer meetings in the DOJ building, boiler room scammer Senator Tom DeLay, the outrageously delusional Sen. James Inhofe (are the folks in Oklahoma really that desperate, to keep electing this guy?), the racist Sen. Trent Lott, Richard Army, cash-and-carry corporate Christians Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell, Democratic poser (ie a rightwinger who greased into office posing as a Democrat) Congressman Tom Lantos, Ralph Reed (co-chair of the Armageddon-engineering "Stand Israel"), the vicious Supreme Court Judges Scalia and Thomas, "journalist" William Kristol (a Jewish Zionist who uses his forum to promote the agenda of the Christian right), Gary Bauer (Kristol's partner in subversion), and rightwing Christian propaganda master supreme Rev. Sun Myung Moon (owner of the "Washington Times" and other publications). Another key fundie is Bush's long-time advisor Marvin "Who am I This Year?" Olasky. Olasky, who has been, at various times, a communist, an atheist and a Jew, now is identifying himself as a "born-again Christian." Incredibly enough, Olasky teaches journalism at the University of Texas (is it any wonder the media is screwed up?). Olasky coined the catch-phrase "Compassionate Conservative."

Equally bad if not worse (by dint of sheer sociopathic coldness) are the people who are exploiting the rightwing religious cause to promote their own very secular agendas. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove, who, while not delusional religious fanatics themselves (unless they keep it better hidden than most), are exploiting Bush's delusions to fulfill their own greed and power based personal agendas. Karl Rove has openly bragged about how successfully he has sucked in the Christian right voters. To keep 'em coming, he panders to their ever whim. Dick Cheney doesn't care how Bush is induced to attack Iraq and other oil-rich countries - as long as Halliburton cleans up afterward. Rumsfeld just likes to see himself on camera and has delusions of another kind (Emperor of the Supreme Global Space Command?). Rupert Murdoch panders to the rightwing in hopes of inducing the administration to overturn regulations preventing him from controlling more than one-third of the airways.

And, of course, throughout it all, Ariel Sharon has cleaned up by exploiting the Zionist Christian agenda - he knows all about their fantasy, which calls for Jews to be in complete control of Israel (in its Biblical borders) before the "Rapture" can occur . Sharon has sucked billions out of the US budget on the pretext of helping to fulfill that prophesy.

It is good to point out here that the Bushie delusional fundies represent a VERY SMALL percentage of people who describe themselve as Christians. Repeated surveys have shown that somewhat less than 1 in 5 Americans say they would describe themselves as belonging to the "Christian Right." Another recent survey showed that the public perceived Christian fundamentalists as only slightly less reprehensible than prostitutes and significantly more objectionable than lawyers and used car salesmen. In fact, nearly every denomination except the Southern Baptists has condemned the war in Iraq, while a growing number of religious organizations adamantly oppose Bush's extremist domestic agenda. In fact, a majority of modern Christians are more concerned with their role as stewards of Earth's endangered resources and upholders of human rights - a sharp contrast to the fundies who see Earth's destruction and the suffering of millions as the "price" for their "glorifiication" in the "Rapture."

But the tiny band of extremists with the "money megaphone" are extremely well-funded, extremely unbalanced (they are not above death threats and murder, as cited above), and, above all, extremely well organized. It is not hard to organize any group that has such a narrow focus and so much to gain by pushing their agenda. In any case, fanatics have a mob mentality, which is highly manipulable and suggestible - thus the success of hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh in channeling their free-floating rage into targeted attacks against "enemies."

The hypocrisy of this administration is not only morally sickening, it is downright dangerous to America's well-being. While Bush turns the country into a Gulag in the name of fighting terrorism, relentlessly persecuting Muslims and anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with a fundie Muslim group, nowhere will you find any reference by Bush, Ashcroft, or any of their marshmallows in the American media about Christian terrorists. Yet, although this group may not be able to claim responsibility for a single crime on the scale of 9/11, its crimes of violence are far, far greater in number:

"With abortion as the ultimate justification for violence, God's terrorists are approaching a quarter of a century of mayhem in north America," writes Christopher Reed in the UK Herald (note how we aren't hearing about this from an American source). " According to the Department of Justice, the present total is more than a dozen murders, 15 attempted murders, 209 bombings, 72 arsons, more than 750 death and bomb threats, and unknown hundreds of acts of vandalism, stalking, burglary, and harassment. Two on the FBI's 10 most wanted list are Christian terrorists: Eric Rudolph of Christian Identity, a fugitive from the Olympic bombing that killed one in Atlanta in 1996 and a fatal abortion clinic bombing in in which a nurse was also blinded; and James Kopp, a disciple of the fanatical Catholic group, Lambs of Christ, who murdered an abortion doctor in Alabama in 1998 and up to five in Canada with a high-powered rifle."

"The American media have reported these incidents, but they don't use the phrase 'Christian terrorists', although that clearly is what they are," says scholar Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy. "The media are terrified of being accused of anti-religious bigotry. They also say we don't hear from them these days, but that's because they deliberately kept quiet during the election year; it's not generally realised how anti-democratic they are. They are essentially authoritarian and it's a scandal America is not being told."

Yet these same Christian terrorists and their admirers are strong supporters of the Bush administration and are obviously being screened and protected by it. If they weren't, then justice would dictate that, in this supposed era of fighting terrorism, that these people, with their appalling history of violence and threats of terrorism, would be persecuted by the DOJ with the same zeal that Muslim terrorists are. You would think that vicious hatemongers like Limbaugh, who intentionally attempt to incite listeners to violence, would be subject to the same endless scrutiny and harassment by the DOJ as Al-Jazeera - which, despite its often lurid content, has never gone to a fraction of the extremes that Limbaugh and Savage routinely go to. But no - all of these terrorists are left alone to continue to foment and/or plot violence against the nonfanatical rest of us.

Not content to allow domestic terrorism against Americans to proceed unchecked, Bush has been dragged us all into a bloody, dishonorable, scarring, and globally divisive war. A psychology professor I had in college, who also happened to be the State's Psychiatric examiner, once made this observation about paranoid schizophrenics, based on long experience: 'If you accept the basic premise of their delusion, then the whole thing [all the details] hangs together amazingly well." So if we accept Bush's basic premise - he is "God's anointed one," leading the "chosen" to glory as he fulfils the Book of Revelation's prescription, then everything he's done hangs together amazingly well. Including allowing Iraq's National Museum to be destroyed. The "divine" prescription (written by a guy who lived in a cave) calls for marching on - and completely trashing - Bablyon (i.e., Baghdad). That's right - the prescription not only calls for a "great battle," it calls for the city to be trashed and all evidence of its artisanry, past and present, to be obliterated:

" Alas, alas, that great city....for in one hour is she made desolate....and a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Bablkyon be thrown down and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers, and musicians and of pipers and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman of whatsoever craft he be shall be found any more in thee and the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; and the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee..."

- excerpt from Chapter 18 of Revelation*
* A book tacked onto the end of the New Testament despite the fact that no one knows for sure who wrote it (though it is attributed usually to John the Apostle, for want of a more likely candidate).

Of course, no one seems to have pointed out to the unquestioning fundies that Revelation, like Nostradamus's ramblings, has been invoked as having predicted, interchangeably, just about every major catastrophe, battle, regime that happened or was "just about to happen" since they were written. Just as, every other year since the dawn of recorded history some group has predicted that the next year would be THE YEAR that the end of the world would come. (Of course, just as a broken clock is right twice a day, some year, say a billion years down the road, they will be right.)

But Bush and company aren't interested in rational thinking or even in waiting to see if the perceived prophesies are fulfilled. Being corporate "players," they aren't leaving anything to chance. Instead, they are engineering a self-fufilling prophesy, financed and backed by the entire US government and military, while the media sits back and watches and American remains uninformed.

Bush and his kind, from Caligula to Hitler, have come and gone. There's always a new egomaniacal delusional dictator popping up somewhere on the map to take their place. Unfortunately for the rest of us, once the world's treasures of antiquity are gone, they are gone forever.

"The High Priests of Violence" by Christopher Reed
http://www.theherald.co.uk/perspective/archive/9-1-19101-21-42-57.html

"Stand for Israel" website - note speeches by Tom Delay and Tom Lantos
http://www.ifcj.org/

"The Rise of the Christian Right in the Republican Party"
http://www.4religious-right.info/

"Israel Winning Broad Support from Christian Right"
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0421-03.htm

"Flying with the Hawks"
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5545

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I admit it -- the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
William Kristol, editor of The Standard, Rupert Murdoch's soon-to-be-launched conservative weekly (New Yorker, 5/22/95)

Kristol, ever the hypocrite and manipulator, continues to promote the myth of the liberal media and to promote the rightwing agenda. T