U.S. has its own version of crazy

There's been a lot of talk about insanity lately. When the United Nations General Assembly met recently, the New York Post, the New York Daily News and other press outlets kept telling us just how nutty some world leaders are. They were all about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, chortling about Hugo Chávez and peeing themselves with laughter at Libya's "Crazy Khadafy."

I'm not going to defend these guys. Still, it made me reflect on the sanity threshold for some of the biggest stone-throwers in the nut house.

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." That was Ronald Reagan back in 1984. OK, he was "joking." But keep in mind, this was the man who got mentally "lost" during the 1984 presidential debate. Who pathologically "couldn't remember" when questioned during the Iran-Contra Affair. That someone like him was a person with the power to launch nuclear war is ... crazy.

Then there's the delusional kind of insanity. Remember Dick Cheney in 2002? "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Or Joe Biden in 2002 on Meet the Press: "Saddam must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power." And Donald Rumsfeld in 2003: "We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

Obama's got a more nuanced shtick. But is it really sane?

In Prague this past April, he said, "The United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons ... Make no mistake: As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."

Since 1945, the U.S. has developed the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb. Along the way, this country has produced huge stockpiles of biological and chemical agents, including anthrax and napalm. While the U.S. renounced biological weapons and agreed to destroy its stockpiles, the anthrax incidents of 2001 underscored how illusory that was.

Even today, the Department of Defense is scouring academia, check in hand, gobbling up patent rights on any technology that can potentially stun, disable or annihilate enemies of the American empire.

That's what Obama means when he talks of maintaining an "effective arsenal." From the internal logic of the global interests of the world's only superpower, such a strategy is reasonable and rational — in a "Scarface" kind of way. From the standpoint of actually having a world that might be around for a few thousand more years, it is nuts.

And just in case anyone's sleeping too easily with Obama in the driver's seat, remember Hillary Clinton said last year that if Iran attacked Israel, "we would be able to totally obliterate them." The inference was that the U.S. would nuke Iran and incinerate its 65 million people. She said it out loud, with a straight face. Of course, at the time she was only a candidate. Obama made her Secretary of State.

I guess that's why you can laugh at Khadafy — he's really nowhere in that league of crazy.