What an utterly insane world we live in. Every day I think it can’t get any wackier, and every day it just gets worse. And worse. How much more?

As usual, my colleagues are useless. Have you heard from them how John Ensign, philanderer and Republican senator from Nevada, told a Senate panel that if you don’t count injuries from car accidents and gun shot wounds, the U.S. health care system is the best in the world.

Let that sink in a minute. I don’t know if he’s right, but if he is, doesn’t that say all that needs to be said about American culture?

And the madness about our president continues too. While there’s plenty to take Obama on about — DOMA, ENDA, DADT, spying on Americans, the useless bailout of the banks, Afghanistan, etc. — the not-so-loyal opposition, with my dear colleagues in lockstep behind, are focusing their attentions on the president’s birth certificate, calling him a Nazi AND a socialist and pretending his race has nothing to do with it.

At Newsmax, John L. Perry said the “Obama problem” could be easily taken care of by a military coup. At a “Take Back America” conference (think about that for a few minutes, Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona said that Obama “has no place in any station of government, and we need to realize that he’s an enemy of humanity.”

And now —  here we go again — it’s time to rattle more sabers at Iran, as if we haven’t already rattled enough sharp objects at the Islamic Republic in the last few years to create a din that could wake the dead.

And — here we go again — now we’ve got satellite images of Iran’s hidden nuclear facility and the neocons are all over themselves screaming that it’s a weapons facility.

Colin Powell, anyone? Satellite images of Saddam Hussein’s weapons factories?

It kills me that my colleagues are going down this same road again.

Now, for the record, I think Iran is being run by crazy people, dangerous lunatics. I can’t say if Iran is thinking about building nuclear weapons. So far, the only proof we have of that is that the West says they are. But the West said Saddam Hussein was building all manner of vicious weapons too, and that turned out not to be true.

Sure, Hussein played some of the same games with the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran plays. But he said that he did that because he wanted Iran, Iraq’s long-time enemy, to think he was building those weapons. Maybe Iran want some folks to think the same thing too. Distributorcap has this to say:

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a second. You lead Iran. Your TWO neighbors have been invaded by the US. Your other close neighbors have/had US troops stationed in it (Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia). The US government was instrumental in a 1953 coup. The US government propped up the hated Shah. The US makes no bones about thinking your oil is really their oil. The US government has called you evil and fanatical.

You think you might have a reason to be a bit nervous?

Let’s take a look at that last sentence. The US is worried about a nation that has evil rulers and religious fanatics running the show. Evil rulers and religious fanatics – shall I say it again?

As the outsider looking in at US society – for nearly one year you have seen some incredible evil people who have riled up hate, fear and violence often under the name of religion — Beck, Coulter, Malkin, Limbaugh. You are seeing some incredibly fanatical, insane and incompetent people vie (and continue to vie) for US leadership — Huckabee and Palin. You see American government leaders in Congress who actually make policy — that are no better than the hate mongers – Michelle Bachmann, John Kyl, Dana Rohrbacher, Trent Franks. You see a lot of evil people and religious fanatics who want to run the US government – a government with 10,500 nukes.

But there’s another enemy even closer than the United States, with nuclear weapons even now aimed at Iran.

Israel.

Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal. The IAEA doesn’t inspect their facilities. They haven’t signed the non-proliferation treaty, joining India, Pakistan and North Korea — all whom at least admit they have nuclear weapons — as non-signers. Israel won’t admit they have nukes. But no one — no one — pushes for sanctions there. To do so would get you branded an anti-Semite, and nobody wants that.

Instead, Israel pushes the comparison between Iran and Nazi Germany, which is at least more accurate than the American right’s view that Barack Obama is a Nazi. Haggai Ram, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, has this to say:

In assessing the Jewish state’s unrelenting recourse to drawing analogies between Iran and Nazi Germany, one should not dismiss the genuine feelings of vulnerability among Israelis stemming from the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. This explains, in part, why despite Israel’s overwhelming military superiority and its own nuclear arsenal, Israeli Jews today are deeply concerned about the likelihood of an impending “second” Holocaust. However misplaced and exaggerated, the reality of such feelings, their importance, must be recognized.

Persistently voicing venomous anti-Israel rhetoric and allegedly pursuing nuclear weapons capabilities, the Iranian government, no doubt, has not been helpful in reducing these misplaced anxieties. To these we should add the reverberations of the electoral earthquake that has shaken the Islamic republic to its core since last June. Indeed, the fraudulent presidential elections and their aftermath have demonstrated to the Israelis the brutal force which that government is prepared to unleash — even against its own people — in order to ensure its survival.

Ram also notes that Israel’s ultra-right foreign minister, Avigdor Leiberman, has said that Israel won’t even attempt to talk about settlement freezes, a Palestinian state, the Golan Heights or anything else until the “Iranian problem” is settled.

More children playing in a giant sandbox. Two nations, both with good reason to be trepidatious,  playing a MAD — mutually assured destruction — game.

That worked during the Cold War, when the leaders of nuclear nations weren’t completely out of their minds. Now? Not so much.

And back here in the good old U.S. of A., the Republicans — some of whom are at least at crazy as Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, are doing everything they can to return to power.

That’s what all the insanity here is really about. Is it racism? Sure as hell. But that’s just a weapon in the GOP arsenal. Rile up the base. Get ‘em all afraid. Vote out the black guy, who’s a socialist and a Nazi and not even American anyway. Then who’s finger is on the nuclear trigger?

We are, may I remind you, the only nation in the world ever to use a nuclear weapon — and we used two, both to devastating effect. Just ask Japan. And yes, I am well aware that the president who ordered those bombings was a Democrat. I may not agree with his decision, but I do believe it was a thoughtful one.

But with a rabid base cheering them on, I doubt seriously a Republican administration would be nearly as thoughtful. We are, after all, now engaged in two wars, one for no reason whatsoever other than the vanity of a president, and the other well on its way to being a lost cause after that same president turned his back on it, allowing the “enemy” to regroup and become much more powerful.

A reminder: We’re not fighting al Qaeda so much now as the Taliban, those lovely fellows in black who blew up statues of the Buddha and murdered women who didn’t play their Sharia games properly.

And our president and our Congress are playing right into the hands of those Republicans who want nothing more than to destroy a presidency and resume what they see as their rightful place at America’s throne.

Iran. Scary scary Iran. We might have to bomb them after all.

They’re all singing along with John McCain now — bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. And there’s my colleagues, playing in the band.

Time to wake up , folks. It may not be health care or our fucked economy that gets us. It may be pure and unmitigated stupidity.