Lost Connection to Reality (Not Dial or DSL)

Those in the viewing audience who've not yet made the transition to post-literacy may be interested in the full text of Fareed Zakaria's response to Podperson Norman's "Bombs Away" essay & the other crap being spewed by the neo-crazies, rather than just the transcript of the two on the News Hour, where time factors & the limitations of verbal expression made the discussion less edifying than reasoned, edited composition.

This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon. The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. [...] Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on? [...] Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.) [...] Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. [...] One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers. [...] Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

The response from the blood-thirsty war-mongers (should they attempt to deal w/ facts) will, of course, be the tired refrain of: "9/11, 9/11! Everything changed after 9/11!!" Many people didn't buy that six yrs. ago, and fewer & fewer are going along w/ it now.