He won't listen to reason, and like a child in a tantrum he need adults to set the rules. Impeach right now, before he uses nukes.

THEN:

"But as soon as setbacks occurred he suffered shipwreck, like most untrained people. Then his ignorance of the rules of the game was revealed as another kind of incompetence; then his defects were no longer strengths. The greater the failures became, the more obstinately his incurable amateurishness came to the fore. The tendency to wild decisions had long been his forte; now it speeded his downfall."

--Speer, page 230, speaking of Hitler's blundering propensity for making bad decisions which led to disaster after disaster

AND NOW:

Staying the course often results in driving over a cliff.

Bush, Cheney, and Rice have put on their neoconservative blinders and have shut themselves away in their ideological bunker. They seem incapable of acknowledging any error or accepting any blame. But will their downfall come with sufficient speed to avoid further catastrophe?

Fortunately for us, sixty years ago the ignorant and incompetent leaders were on the other side. Imagine the fix we would have been in had Hitler and his sycophants possessed not merely their overweening arrogance and malevolence, but also sound judgment and the ability to solicit sage advice. But at the same time reflect on the morass in which we find ourselves now, under an eerily similar style of leadership.

"We can't possibly let things go on this way."

Indeed, we can't.

THEN:

"The departure from reality, which was visibly spreading like a contagion, was no peculiarity of the National Socialist regime. But in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world."

--Speer, page 291

AND NOW:

Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. stubbornly insist that Iraq is salvageable, and that democracy is just around the corner. They continue to fantasize that the invasion of Iraq will succeed in imposing Western-style secular democracy throughout the Islamic world, even if much of the Islamic world happens to reject Western values and in the face of evidence that the occupation of Iraq has brought hordes of new, fanatically committed recruits to the jihadist cause in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world.

THEN:

"On July 26, 1944, Hitler boasted to the heads of industry: 'All I know is that unprecedentedly strong nerves and unprecedented resolution are necessary if a leader is to survive in times such as these and make decisions which concern our very existence.... Any other man in my place would have been unable to do what I have done; his nerves would not have been strong enough.'"

--Speer, page 305

"At any rate, the more inexorably events moved toward catastrophe, the more inflexible he became, the more rigidly convinced that everything he decided on was right."

--Speer, page 292, describing Hitler's unalterable conviction in his own infallibility

"I can only explain Hitler's rigid attitude on the grounds that he made himself believe in his ultimate victory. In a sense he was worshipping himself. He was forever holding up to himself a mirror in which he saw not only himself but also the confirmation of his mission by divine Providence.... He was by nature a religious man, but his capacity for belief had been perverted into belief in himself."

--Speer, page 357

"I often feel that we will have to undergo all the trials the devil and hell can devise before we achieve Final Victory.... I believe that he who fights valiantly obeying the laws which a god has established and who never capitulates but instead gathers his forces time after time and always pushes forward--such a man will not be abandoned by the Lawgiver. Rather, he will ultimately receive the blessing of Providence. And that blessing has been imparted to all great spirits in history."

--Speer, page 555, again quoting Hitler's speech to German industrialists on June 26, 1944, three weeks after the Allied D-Day landings

"The church is certainly necessary for the people. It is a strong and conservative element."

--Speer, page 95, quoting Hitler, who was both a teetotaler and a vegetarian, and who cleverly manipulated socially conservative forces to rise to power

AND NOW:

Bush, after spending most of his adult life as a binge drinker and failed businessman, purports to be "born again," lists Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, and claimed to Bob Woodward to be on a mission to do "the Lord's will in Iraq." He is now apparently a teetotaler. He and his strategist, Karl Rove, appealed to socially conservative evangelical Christians to ensure the Republican victory in 2004.

Lt. General William G. Boykin, still the deputy undersecretary for defense in charge of intelligence (a position one would hope would be filled by someone prepared to view reality in a detached and rational way), purports to be an evangelical Christian. He boasts of telling a Muslim warlord in Somalia in 1993: "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol." Boykin has gone in his Army uniform to a Sunday circuit of evangelical congregations to proclaim that the war against terrorists is a war against Satan, and he tells the congregations that George W. Bush is in the White House because "God put him there."

Bush clearly views the evangelicals, followers of medieval bigots such as Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jerry Falwell, as part of the Republicans' base of social conservatives, and Boykin has served as a point man with the mission of whipping up their righteous fervor.

As a nod to his base, Bush ended his call for a further "surge" into Iraq with an invocation of the "Author of Liberty." Is that phrase some kind of subtext understood in the Deep South, Bush's last remaining political bastion?

It looks as though Christian fundamentalist religious nuts are the mirror image of Islamic fundamentalist religious nuts.