Von Hoffman is right on target. Bush's neocon-engineered proxy war for Israel in Iraq--which ran up huge deficits, thus totaled the dollar, thus tripled the price of gas at the pump--was as much an object lesson in the dangers of arrogant fantasies as the parallel mortgage crisis which will be its twin pillar of disaster marking the ruins of the unexampled Bush debacle in the annals of American history. He's made Harding look like Lincoln--the perfect symbolic choice for both the fat cats who hired and used him like a ventriloquist's dummy, and for the equally stupid masses they conned into voting for this dolt.

Wachovia will announce its bankruptcy any day now; the fourth-largest bank in the country is about to fail, another monument to the stupid, blinding hubris. pervading most of our institutions. If Israel is fool enough to bomb Iran, triple gas prices yet again, wipe out the stock market and give us a Depression for dessert, after its suicidal neocon warm-up in Iraq, Israel and AIPAC will end up like Wachovia and Bush, more giant victims of the age's endemic blindness from sheer, dumb overconfidence.

Fred White

Baltimore, MD