Whom the gods wish to destroy they first send mad — Euripides

In 2007  we pleaded

 … tell me that America isn’t completely barmy, batty, berserk, bonkers, cracked, crazed, cuckoo, crazy, demented, deranged, dippy, flipped out, fruity, haywire, insane, loony, lunatic, mad, maniacal, manic, mental, nuts, nutty, out of their minds, potty, psycho, screw loose, screwy, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged, unzipped and whacko.

It is truer today than it was then.

As Glenn Greenwald says this week at Salon,

“ There’s little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era — and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible — both in politics and the establishment media — not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one’s culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

He’s talking about the amazing revelations this week by Tom Ridge, the first head of the US Department of Homeland Security, that he had been pressured for political reasons to raise the terror threat level just before the 2004 elections.

“ [Ridge] wasn’t keen on writing a tell-all. But in ‘The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again’, out September 1, Ridge says he wants to shake “public complacency” over security. And to do that, well, he needs to tell all. Especially about the infighting he saw that frustrated his attempts to build a smooth-running department. Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

What is extraordinary but not surprising is that those on the US right, now told categorically that they were wrong when they said the government wouldn’t do something like that and that the left were loony conspiracy theorists, take a position something like, “Yes but we were right to be wrong and the left were wrong to be right because, you know, we respected Our President but the left were just Bush Haters.”

Greenwald addressed this craziness in his Salon column this week

“ Ambinder’s belief that there is nothing other than blind “Bush hatred” that could have justified such a belief — and his accompanying self-defense that journalists like him had no way of knowing any of this — is patently false. [A] 2006 Time column by Josh Marshall … details the ample empirical evidence suggesting that “that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP’s poll numbers.”

And [t]here is an exhaustive and lengthy (17 minutes) segment from Keith Olbermann early last year that “weaves from each revelation of an intelligence failure or a Democratic political victory to an almost immediate orange alert or ‘new threat’ from al Qaeda.”

Olbermann’s conclusion after examining all the evidence: “what we were told about terror, and not told, for security reasons, has overlapped considerably with what we were told about terror, and not told, for political reasons” (Olbermann had been raising the same suspicion for many years).

The reason journalists such as Ambinder saw no such evidence wasn’t because it didn’t exist. It existed in abundance; you had to suffer from some form of moral, intellectual or emotional blindness not to see it. It’s because they didn’t want to see it, because — as Ambinder said — they trusted the Bush administration as good and decent people who might err but would never do anything truly dishonest.

It’s because only loser Leftist ideologues distrusted Bush officials and the overriding goal of establishment journalists is to prove that they are not like them, that they’re much more serious and responsible and thus would never attribute bad motives to government leaders such as those who ran the Bush administration.

Putting Greenwald’s piece together with the insanity and ignorance of the US health insurance debate it is quite clear that the US is in mental, moral and political free fall. It is thrashing and flailing about for something to hold onto, not knowing where it is going. And it is going into a very dark pit.