Question: which of those world leaders is the raving lunatic?

Sorry, that was a trick question. The answer is either none of them or all of them, depending upon the smell of sulphur that lingers when you leave a voting booth, or the number of headless bodies you believe Allah requires, or the number of times you've spit in the face of foreign hosts when invited to speak in thier countries. No matter what Iraniam president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Venezualen president Hugo Chavez said at the United Nations last week, it just went to show, as Sen. John McCain said yesterday, "That any two bit dictator with the air fare to New York" can speak to the United Nations.

What you and I should be more interested in is what our president said in support of systematic brutality to gain "valuable information vital to our national security." In another time and another place, George Bush could have been speaking with a German accent telling his countrymen, "Vee haff vays of makingk them talk."

Speaking on Face the Nation, Sen. McCain, who spent five hellish years undergoing torture in North Vietnamese prisoner of war camps, explained his opposition to the president's call for extra-legal coersive techniques to extract information from suspected terrorists. "We (the United States) must maintain the moral high ground," McCain said, stating in a nutshell what President Bush wants to throw away, if he hasn't already.

Secret intelligence reports leaked to and published yesterday by the New York Times and Washiongton Post, reveal the conclusion by experts that the American war in Iraq is hindering the war on terrorism by radicalizing a formerly sympathetic or indifferent Muslim world against the United States. You might say that such an intelligence report is a bit of a no brainer. That fact has been staring us in the face for upwards of two years. The president could ignore that intelligence report the same way he ignored the report presented to him by then-National Security Advisor Condeleeza Rice a month befor 9/11 that said that Al Queda and Osama Bin Laden pose a direct and imminent terrorist threat to the American homeland.

The Bush Administration's ill-conceived and naive Iraq War policy, which depended upon an immediate post-war American-brokered handshake among sects that had been murdering each other for centuries to create a peacable kingdom of Democracy in the Arab world, was so far over the rainbow to begin with that its failure is a surprise only to its architects.

For Bush to argue in favor of torture in the wake of the photos of the inhuman disgrace of Abu Graib -- virtually terrorist recuitment posters showing Uncle Sam pointing an upraised finger at the Muslim world and saying, "I Want You to Kiss My. . ." -- shows you how defiantly out of touch Bush remains. The real answer: They're all nuts. All three of those world leaders who addressed the United Nations last week. Problem is, one of those nuts is ours.