PRESIDENT BUSH 'OUT OF TOUCH' WITH REALITY

By Joyce Marcel,
American Reporter Correspondent,
Dummerston, VT.

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the election recedes, there's good news and bad news. And we're not going to like any of it.

Welcome to the world of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, whose remarkable career has been bookended by two of the most shameful events in America's military history: My Lai in Vietnam, a story he broke as a free-lance reporter, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, a story he broke for The New Yorker.

During his 38-year career, Hersh has written eight books, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer and a host of other prizes. His sources serve at the highest levels of many governments, including our own.

In person, Hersh is tall, stooped, rumpled, gray-haired and bespectacled. He speaks rapidly and intensely in a deep voice. Currently touring to "pimp," as he put it, his newest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," he spoke last week at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., to a rapt audience of about 900 people. They greeted him with applause; he said, "Thank you, but you'll be less happy once I'm done."

Hersh's message is simple and frightening: "(George W.) Bush is an ideologue, a Utopian," Hersh said. "He wants to clean out the Middle East and install democracy. He doesn't care how many body bags come back home. There's nothing more dangerous than an ideologue who is completely bonkers and no one is going to tell him."

President Bush is committed to perpetual war, Hersh said.

The emperor continues to wander about with no clothes on and, seems intent on remaining in a state of deshabillé. This highlighted by the fact that he is stacking his cabinet with like-minded ideologues, also known as 'yes men'. In Condi's case, that would be 'yes woman'. Dubbyuh's cabinet, like so many bobble-head figures, will avidly nod yes at his every suggestion, no matter how ludicrous or outright mad it may be.

As his disconnect with reality continues to widen, events will spiral more and more wildly out of control and Dubbyuh will remain insulated in his blood-stained bubble. In the meantime, more of our soldiers will come home in body bags...Iraq will slide into civil-war...The US economy will continue to crumble, this as the world trades in euros rather than dollars...And our American Nero will continue to fiddle.