When you are insane, sane people try to assist you and improve your mental health; they try to restore a sense of functional reality. As for Bush, the mainstream media and most of the politicians and pundits on Capitol Hill keep covering the perspective of the inmates, rather than the reality on the outside of the asylum. Iraq is continuing to deteriorate. The bloody curse of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice fiasco is reaching a pure descent into Hell, yet the mainstream corporate media is still providing a veneer of credibility to Bush, when all around the world is crumbling. We thought we would give three quick reality-based reminders, so you won't think that you are the insane one, in addition to the horrifying news that is "catapulting" out of Iraq: 1) As the wonderful journalist, Robert Parry, reports, when Bush was given notice in August of 2001 that the U.S. was at risk for a terror attack, he responded thus to the CIA briefer:

"The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat on Aug. 6, 2001, with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. The CIA sent analysts to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.' "Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, 'All right, you’ve covered your ass,' according to [Ron] Suskind’s book. "Then, putting the CIA’s warning in the back of his mind and ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research."

Excuse us, but why isn't this on the front page of every newspaper in the United States? From Bush's arrogant, selfish, peevish negligence to protect the U.S. from hijackings that resulted in 9/11 to Bush's reading of "My Pet Goat" as America was under attack, we see a commander-in-chief who should be "court martialed," not taken seriously. This account from Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine" proves that we are all at risk as long as the Bush wrecking crew of power-mad incompetents is in the White House. 2) As for media priorities, we ran across this "big story" from the Associated Press, "Suspect in tunnel plot said to visit U.S." Okay, is this worthy of front page story treatment, when the world is on fire because of Bush's failure to deal with reality? First of all, the article notes that one "suspect" came to California six years ago for apparently legal reasons to visit relatives. What in the world does that have to do with an alleged -- and we emphasize alleged -- bomb plot in NYC? What it has to do is with Rove stringing out the "campaign of terror and fear mid-term election strategy" another day on a third-rate story of remotely possible "aspirational" terror. What's more, the AP repeats the impossible assertion that the "plotters" planned to flood lower Manhattan by blowing up a tunnel under the Hudson. As BuzzFlash noted in recent commentaries (including this one), this is an impossibility according to the laws of physics. But the Associated Press hasn't figured that out yet, because as Stephen Colbert so aptly noted, they just copy down PR stories from the White House. Is the Associated Press an accomplice to Rove's third-in-a-row campaign of fear to win an election cycle? You bet. 3) Finally, we want to say that we can't be 100% sure of this because we just saw it as someone was flipping through channels, but we believe Bush told Larry King (in a weekend interview, the bemused Laura at his side like a tranquilized terrier) that U.S. citizens don't have to worry about a missile attack from North Korea. Why, because -- and this is the part that we heard -- we, Bush asserted, have a missile defense system set up to defend the nation. Excuse us, has anyone seen any credible reports that this MDS fiasco that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars works any better than a Yugo without an engine? We haven't. But Larry King, we imagine, let such fantasy island assurances go unchallenged. All is well on Fantasy Island, as the dire situtation in Iraq deterioriates daily and American national security is increasingly at risk. But the mainstream media is too busy transcribing propaganda to brief us on the reality-based world. And we are all in a perilous situation as a result, extremely perilous.